Full Disclosure mailing list archives
High performance exception/traceback reporting system
From: "Cal Leeming [Simplicity Media Ltd]" <cal.leeming () simplicitymedialtd co uk>
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2011 17:17:22 +0000
Hey all, For the last two years, I've been meaning to write a reporting server which allows webapps to post their exception tracebacks, which are then viewable from a centralized location. After having Thunderbird corrupt my mailbox due to over 250 thousand debug emails, this project has now been given a bit more priority ;) The current prototype stores basic exception information (the file path, line number, exception type, exception value, originating webapp, node hostname etc) in the database, and the traceback details are then serialized, dumped into a file, and the path to that file stored against the row. A web interface then allows you to browse through these exceptions (currently via Django admin), and view them using the same prettified exception page which it shows for actual exceptions. This prettified page also shows the variables within each frame in the stack, which is very handy!
From a developers point of view, this makes life extremely easy, because all
your webapps report to a single place, you can do sphinx searches, alerts, custom reports etc, and it looks pretty lol. The entire thing is going to be open source, and will eventually be a one-click install with a set up page etc. Here are some of the features I am planning on adding, but if anyone has any suggestions as to what they would like to see in this, please feel free to mention them! - Tracebacks can be sent to the server primarily via POST request, but custom plugins will allow it to pull in via other means (such as mail attachments) - Alerts can be given different classifications (for example, you could configure specific nodes, webapps, or exception types to alert you via BulkSMS) - Prettified traceback page should initially support Python/PHP, other languages can be added as and when. - Basic authentication / IP restrictions for the admin login - Authentication support for when the tracebacks are POST'd to the server - Tar source should pre-package a lightweight nginx/uwsgi/python environment, so it is self sufficient (this will need to be security maintained obviously). - A nice, pretty, easy to use interface, because this just makes people feel all nice and warm inside ^_^ I don't want to go as far as to say that it should be used to collect error_log outputs, I think that would be going a bit too far, the main reason for having a system like this is simply due to the sheer amount of information usually contained within a traceback dump, and the Django prettifier makes it so much easier to debug with! Thoughts/criticisms welcome! Cal
_______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/
Current thread:
- High performance exception/traceback reporting system Cal Leeming [Simplicity Media Ltd] (Feb 11)
- Re: High performance exception/traceback reporting system coderman (Feb 11)
- Re: High performance exception/traceback reporting system coderman (Feb 11)
- Re: High performance exception/traceback reporting system Cal Leeming [Simplicity Media Ltd] (Feb 11)
- Re: High performance exception/traceback reporting system coderman (Feb 11)
- Message not available
- Re: High performance exception/traceback reporting system Cal Leeming [Simplicity Media Ltd] (Feb 13)
- Re: High performance exception/traceback reporting system Daniël W . Crompton (Feb 13)
- Re: High performance exception/traceback reporting system Cal Leeming [Simplicity Media Ltd] (Feb 14)
- Re: High performance exception/traceback reporting system Daniël W . Crompton (Feb 14)
- Re: High performance exception/traceback reporting system Cal Leeming [Simplicity Media Ltd] (Feb 13)
- Re: High performance exception/traceback reporting system coderman (Feb 11)