asgi-correlation-id 1.0.0

Middleware correlating project logs to individual requests

ASGI Correlation ID middleware

Middleware for loading or generating correlation IDs for each incoming request. Correlation IDs can be added to your logs, making it simple to retrieve all logs generated from a single HTTP request.

When the middleware detects a correlation ID HTTP header in an incoming request, the ID is stored. If no header is found, a correlation ID is generated for the request instead.

The middleware checks for the X-Request-ID header by default, but can be set to any key. X-Correlation-ID is also pretty commonly used.

Example

Once logging is configure, your output will go from this

INFO    ... project.views  This is an info log
WARNING ... project.models This is a warning log
INFO    ... project.views  This is an info log
INFO    ... project.views  This is an info log
WARNING ... project.models This is a warning log
WARNING ... project.models This is a warning log

to this

INFO    ... [773fa6885] project.views  This is an info log
WARNING ... [773fa6885] project.models This is a warning log
INFO    ... [0d1c3919e] project.views  This is an info log
INFO    ... [99d44111e] project.views  This is an info log
WARNING ... [0d1c3919e] project.models This is a warning log
WARNING ... [99d44111e] project.models This is a warning log

Now we're actually able to see which logs are related.

Installation

pip install asgi-correlation-id

Setup

To set up the package, you need to add the middleware and configure logging.

Adding the middleware

The middleware can be added like this

from fastapi import FastAPI
from starlette.middleware import Middleware

from asgi_correlation_id import CorrelationIdMiddleware

app = FastAPI(middleware=[Middleware(CorrelationIdMiddleware)])

or like this

from fastapi import FastAPI

from asgi_correlation_id import CorrelationIdMiddleware

app = FastAPI()
app.add_middleware(CorrelationIdMiddleware)

or any other way your framework allows.

For Starlette apps, just substitute FastAPI with Starlette in the example above.

The middleware only has two settings:

class CorrelationIdMiddleware(
    # The HTTP header key to read IDs from.
    header_name='X-Request-ID',
    # Enforce UUID formatting to limit chance of collisions
    # - Invalid header values are discarded, and an ID is generated in its place
    validate_header_as_uuid=True,
): ...

Configure logging

To set up logging of the correlation ID, you simply have to add the log-filter the package provides.

If your current log-config looked like this:

LOGGING = {
    'version': 1,
    'disable_existing_loggers': False,
    'formatters': {
        'web': {
            'class': 'logging.Formatter',
            'datefmt': '%H:%M:%S',
            'format': '%(levelname)s ... %(name)s %(message)s',
        },
    },
    'handlers': {
        'web': {
            'class': 'logging.StreamHandler',
            'formatter': 'web',
        },
    },
    'loggers': {
        'my_project': {
            'handlers': ['web'],
            'level': 'DEBUG',
            'propagate': True,
        },
    },
}

You simply have to add the filter, like this

+ from asgi_correlation_id.log_filters import correlation_id_filter

LOGGING = {
    'version': 1,
    'disable_existing_loggers': False,
+   'filters': {
+       'correlation_id': {'()': correlation_id_filter(uuid_length=32)},
+   },
    'formatters': {
        'web': {
            'class': 'logging.Formatter',
            'datefmt': '%H:%M:%S',
+           'format': '%(levelname)s ... [%(correlation_id)s] %(name)s %(message)s',
        },
    },
    'handlers': {
        'web': {
            'class': 'logging.StreamHandler',
+           'filters': ['correlation_id'],
            'formatter': 'web',
        },
    },
    'loggers': {
        'my_project': {
            'handlers': ['web'],
            'level': 'DEBUG',
            'propagate': True,
        },
    },
}

If you're using a json log-formatter, just add correlation-id: %(correlation_id)s to your list of properties.

Extensions

In addition to the middleware, we've added a couple of extensions for third-party packages.

Sentry

If your project has sentry-sdk installed, correlation IDs will automatically be added to Sentry events as a transaction_id.

See this blogpost for a little bit of detail. The transaction ID is displayed in the event detail view in Sentry and is just an easy way to connect logs to a Sentry event.

Celery

For Celery user's there's one primary issue: workers run as completely separate processes, so correlation IDs are lost when spawning background tasks from requests.

However, with some Celery signal magic, we can actually transfer correlation IDs to worker processes, like this:

@before_task_publish.connect()
def transfer_correlation_id(headers) -> None:
    # This is called before task.delay() finishes
    # Here we're able to transfer the correlation ID via the headers kept in our backend
    headers[header_key] = correlation_id.get()


@task_prerun.connect()
def load_correlation_id(task) -> None:
    # This is called when the worker picks up the task
    # Here we're able to load the correlation ID from the headers
    id_value = task.request.get(header_key)
    correlation_id.set(id_value)

To configure correlation ID transfer, simply import and run the setup function the package provides:

from asgi_correlation_id.extensions.celery import load_correlation_ids

load_correlation_ids()

Taking it one step further - Adding Celery tracing IDs

In addition to transferring request IDs to Celery workers, we've added one more log filter for improving tracing in celery processes. This is completely separate from correlation ID functionality, but is something we use ourselves, so keep in the package with the rest of the signals.

The log filter adds an ID, celery_current_id for each worker process, and an ID, celery_parent_id for the process that spawned it.

Here's a quick summary of outputs from different scenarios:

Scenario	Correlation ID	Celery Current ID	Celery Parent ID
Request	✅
Request -> Worker	✅	✅
Request -> Worker -> Another worker	✅	✅	✅
Beat -> Worker	✅*	✅
Beat -> Worker -> Worker	✅*	✅	✅

*When we're in a process spawned separately from an HTTP request, a correlation ID is still spawned for the first process in the chain, and passed down. You can think of the correlation ID as an origin ID, while the combination of current and parent-ids as a way of linking the chain.

To add the current and parent IDs, just alter your celery.py to this:

+ from asgi_correlation_id.extensions.celery import load_correlation_ids, load_celery_current_and_parent_ids

load_correlation_ids()
+ load_celery_current_and_parent_ids()

To set up the additional log filters, update your log config like this:

+ from asgi_correlation_id.log_filters import celery_tracing_id_filter, correlation_id_filter

LOGGING = {
    'version': 1,
    'disable_existing_loggers': False,
    'filters': {
        'correlation_id': {'()': correlation_id_filter(uuid_length=32)},
+       'celery_tracing': {'()': celery_tracing_id_filter(uuid_length=32)},
    },
    'formatters': {
        'web': {
            'class': 'logging.Formatter',
            'datefmt': '%H:%M:%S',
            'format': '%(levelname)s ... [%(correlation_id)s] %(name)s %(message)s',
        },
+       'celery': {
+           'class': 'logging.Formatter',
+           'datefmt': '%H:%M:%S',
+           'format': '%(levelname)s ... [%(correlation_id)s] [%(celery_parent_id)s-%(celery_current_id)s] %(name)s %(message)s',
+       },
    },
    'handlers': {
        'web': {
            'class': 'logging.StreamHandler',
            'filters': ['correlation_id'],
            'formatter': 'web',
        },
+       'celery': {
+           'class': 'logging.StreamHandler',
+           'filters': ['correlation_id', 'celery_tracing'],
+           'formatter': 'celery',
+       },
    },
    'loggers': {
        'my_project': {
+           'handlers': ['celery' if any('celery' in i for i in sys.argv) else 'web'],
            'level': 'DEBUG',
            'propagate': True,
        },
    },
}

With these IDs configured you should be able to:

1. correlate all logs from a single origin, and
2. piece together the order each log was run, and which process spawned which