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Application instrumentation and logging, with a geological bent.

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lithoxyl

Application instrumentation and logging, with a geological bent. Documentation is available on Read the Docs.

An infomercial of sorts

"Has this ever happened to you?"

Here's an example of some ostensibly well-instrumented code.

import logging

def create_user(name):
    logging.info('creating user with name %r', name)
    try:
        success = _create_user(name)
        if success:
            logging.info('successfully created user %r', name)
        else:
            logging.error('failed to create user %r', name)
    except Exception:
        logging.critical('exception encountered while creating user %r',
                         name, exc_info=True)
    return success

Notice how the logging statements tend to dominate the code, almost drowning out the meaning of the code.

Here's lithoxyl's take:

from lithoxyl import stderr_log

def create_user(name):
    with stderr_log.critical('user creation', username=name, reraise=False) as r:
        success = _create_user(name)
        if not success:
            r.failure()
    return success

Feature brief

  • Transactional logging
  • Semantic instrumentation
  • Pure Python
  • Pythonic context manager API minimizes developer errors
  • Decorator syntax is convenient and unobtrusive
  • Human-readable structured logs
  • Reparseability thanks to autoescaping
  • Statistical accumulators for prerolled metrics
  • Programmatic configuration with sensible defaults just an import away
  • Synchronous mode for simplicity
  • Asynchronous operation for performance critical applications
  • Log file headers for metadata handling
  • Heartbeat for periodic output and checkpointing
  • Automatic, fast log parser generation (TBI)
  • Sinks
    • EWMASink
    • DebuggerSink
    • MomentSink
    • QuantileSink
    • StreamSink
    • SyslogSink
    • and more

Reasons to use Lithoxyl

  • More specific: distinguishes between level and status
  • Safer: Transactional logging ensures that exceptions are always recorded appropriately
  • Lower overhead: Lithoxyl can be used more places in code (e.g., tight loops), as well as more environments, without concern of excess overhead.
  • More Pythonic: Python's logging module is a port of log4j, and it shows.
  • No global state: Lithoxyl has virtually no internal global state, meaning fewer gotchas overall
  • Higher concurrency: less global state and less overhead mean fewer places where contention can occur
  • More succinct: Rather than try/except/finally, use a simple with block
  • More useful: Lithoxyl represents a balance between logging and profiling
  • More composable: Get exactly what you want by recombining new and provided components
  • More lightweight: Simplicity, composability, and practicality, make Lithoxyl something one might reach for earlier in the development process. Logging shouldn't be an afterthought, nor should it be a big investment that weighs down development, maintenance, and refactoring.