Diagnostics - Seeing Inside Your Application Without Logging

You know it as the fuel gauge in your car, the blinking lights on your modem or the operational status page of your favourite cloud service. It's diagnostics! A data efficient technique for seeing how well your system is running in real time.

What isn't so well known is that diagnostics can be embedded directly into your python application. Doing it this way provides a purely on-demand and human-readable interface of real-time system state and performance.

Compared to a sequence of log messages, diagnostics are certainly more difficult to implement. After all, logging is essentially just some well-placed print statements, outputted to a file or third-party logging agent.

But this type of logging can be expensive, bandwidth intensive and hard to make sense of. Have you ever had to trawl through pages and pages of logs just to check your application is working well?

In this talk, you will learn a number of practical and pythonic techniques for serving custom diagnostics from within your application.