Monitoring & Scaling

Production Monitoring

• Logging: Python logging module — configure formatters, handlers (file, stdout, Sentry). Structured logging (JSON format) for machine parsing. Log levels: DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR, CRITICAL
• Error Tracking: Sentry — automatic exception capture with stack traces, affected users, release tracking. sentry-sdk integrates with Django middleware. Alert on new/recurring errors
• Performance Monitoring: django-silk (development profiling), New Relic/Datadog (production APM) — track request latency, database query time, slow endpoints, throughput
• Horizontal Scaling: Multiple Django containers behind a load balancer — each handles a portion of traffic. Session storage in Redis (shared across instances). Database connection pooling
• Celery Task Queue: Celery + Redis/RabbitMQ — offload heavy tasks (email sending, image processing, PDF generation) to background workers. Don't block web requests with slow operations
• Caching Strategy: Redis for Django cache — cache entire views (@cache_page), template fragments ({% cache %}), query results (cache.get/set). Invalidation is the hard part — use TTL + manual invalidation

Try It Yourself: Deployment Checklist

# Django Deployment Checklist

checks = {
    "DEBUG = False": True,
    "SECRET_KEY from env": True,
    "ALLOWED_HOSTS set": True,
    "HTTPS enforced": True,
    "Static files collected": True,
    "Database backed up": True,
    "CORS configured": False,
    "Rate limiting": False,
    "Error monitoring": True,
    "Logging configured": True,
}

print("=" * 35)
print("Django Deployment Checklist")
print("=" * 35)

passed = sum(1 for v in checks.values() if v)
for check, ok in checks.items():
    icon = "[PASS]" if ok else "[FAIL]"
    print(f"  {icon} {check}")

score = (passed / len(checks)) * 100
print(f"
Score: {passed}/{len(checks)} ({score:.0f}%)")
if score == 100:
    print("Ready for production!")
else:
    print("Fix remaining items first")

Quick Quiz — Django DevOps