MONITORING OF DJANGO ACTIVE USERS

Online monitoring of active users in Django using Redis

Collecting information about active users in the Django application for last specified time interval, using Redis cache.

Requirements

• Python: 3.6+

• Django: 2.0+

• Django-redis: 4.9.0

  4.11.0 (for Django 3.0+)

Install

pip install django-active-users

Setup

Your django application should have a Redis cache setting. See more in django-redis official documentation.

Add active_users.middleware.ActiveUsersSessionMiddleware to your project's MIDDLEWARE after the AuthenticationMiddleware.

MIDDLEWARE = (
    ...
    'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
    'active_users.middleware.ActiveUsersSessionMiddleware',
    ...
)

Settings

ACTIVE_USERS_KEY_EXPIRE - Time of key expire (interval after the last request during which the visitor is considered as active) in seconds. Default is 20.

ACTIVE_USERS_EXCLUDE_URL_PATTERNS - List of regular expressions for excluded URLs. If they are matched, the visitor (and pageview) key will not be create.

ACTIVE_USERS_KEY_CLASS - Class of visitor key entry. It should be a descendant of active_users.keys.AbstractActiveUserEntry. Default active_users.keys.ActiveUserEntry. See more in Custom dimensions in the keys

API

You can use API for getting information about active users. You can also call methods from active_users.api module directly.

Methods:

• get_active_users_count - returns count of active users (users, who visited site for the last time interval, which is set by option ACTIVE_USERS_KEY_EXPIRE)
• get_active_users - returns list of dictionaries with information about active users; keys of dictionaries are set from field fields of entry class, which is set by option ACTIVE_USERS_KEY_CLASS

Also, you can include special view in your Django application, adding the URL pattern to your urls.py file

urlpatterns = [
    ...
    url(r'^active-users/', include('active_users.api.urls')),
    ...
]

Custom dimensions in the keys

By default, 4 dimensions are saved in the keys (user_id, session_id, IP, username). This is provided by class ActiveUserEntry, which inherits from abstract class AbstractActiveUserEntry. You can use your dimensions, defined in your own class, which should be a descendant of class AbstractActiveUserEntry and you need to define the logic of using these dimensions in the class method create_from_request.

For example, we need to save information about service, which makes request, and this information we can take from request header. Also, we want use all dimensions from class ActiveUserEntry.

from active_users.keys import ActiveUserEntry

class OurActiveUserEntry(ActiveUserEntry):

    fields = ('service_id',) + ActiveUserEntry.fields

    @classmethod
    def create_from_request(cls, request):
        instance = super(OurActiveUserEntry, cls).create_from_request(request)
        instance.service_id = request.META.get('HTTP_SERVICE_ID', u'')
        return instance

At the end, we need to specify option ACTIVE_USERS_KEY_CLASS in the settings.py.

ACTIVE_USERS_KEY_CLASS = 'my_app.keys.OurActiveUserEntry'