eventbrite / tikibar

A debugging and information toolbar for django, designed for lightweight impact so it can be enabled selectively and run in production.

Tikibar

A debugging and information toolbar for django, designed for lightweight impact so it can be enabled selectively and run in production.

Features

Among other things, it includes:

• CPU usage time statistics
• Used template tracking
• SQL call logging and timing
• Cross-domain functionality

Getting Started

To use Tikibar, you need to add it to your Django INSTALLED_APPS and then include the middleware (tikibar.middleware.TikibarMiddleware) in your Django middleware configuration.

Release Process

• Bump version in tikibar/version.py | __version_info__ = (x, x, x).
• git add tikibar/version.py
• git commit -am 'Bump tikibar to x.x.x'
• git push origin master
• git tag -a x.x.x -m "Bump tikibar to x.x.x"
• git push origin x.x.x

tikibar's Issues

Improve usefulness of client timing tab

Right now, the client timing tab in tikibar is doing a bad impersonation of the Chrome devtools waterfall. Someone who is motivated to work on frontend things should feel free to make that tab useful, or optionally deprecate it.

Flesh out test app

The test application in the tikibar repo should use as much of Tikibar's functionality as possible.

Pull out the "Analytics" tab into something generalizable.

The way tikibar handles analytics actions is one of the last things that needs to change before we can open source tikibar.

One way of doing this is to make a "plugins" framework, where users could register an analytics handler for tikibar that would "do the right thing"

The super simple version of this is make a settings flag that turns analytics actions on or off.

Timing graph should represent clock time, rather than just cascading

The "time in queries" graph purports to represent how long each query took, and indeed the width of each bar is proportional to the time spent relative to the full width of the view. But the position of the bar is misleading - every bar is positioned immediately to the right of the bar above it.

In reality, these events can overlap and have spaces between them. The most obvious example is when a local SOA call makes SQL requests - the large bar representing the SOA call should overlap the SQL requests that are made as part of that call. As it is, the graph "double counts" time spent in SOA.

The events as recorded have accurate start/end timestamps on them. So the bars should just be drawn with a left/width based on that, not on whatever happens to have been drawn already.

Turning tikibar off isn't reflected to the API domain

When you turn the tikibar off, it should be turned off on your API domain as well as your main domain.

Tikibar should be able to work cross-domain

If multiple domains are being powered by the same Django app, and if tikibar is enabled on one domain, it should show up on other domains.

The use case right now is, if you have a main domain and an API browser domain, tikibar being enabled on the main domain should show it on the API browser domain.

This used to work, but doesn't now. The cookie is being set correctly on the API domain, but Tikibar isn't showing up.

Digging into the "should show tikibar" code may reveal the answer.

Include optional middleware for SQL tracking

Right now, we use Eventbrite's custom SQL handler to log things to tikibar. To make tikibar usable for non-Eventbrite people, we need to include a SQL logger that people can optionally include, preferably through middle-ware.

Stacks deeper than 30 function calls are not displayed properly

You can see that the raw data is there if you export the tikibar data as json, but functions beyond the lowest thirty are not displayed when you look at the flamegraph in tikibar.

Create SQL Tracking Middleware

Right now we collect the SQL metrics tikibar uses in a custom piece of Eventbrite-specific code. We should work on getting a piece of middleware running that does the same collection for non-Eventbrite users.

Tikibar should catch sentry errors

So that they can be displayed on an OOPS page and staff on production can get better info.

Include time spent in each template in tikibar information

Make it generalizable, so it works for django templates, as well as mako (which we use)

Add a @time_with_tikibar decorator and display timed functions as an option in the header

This decorator would be able to wrap methods and functions. If a decorated function/method exists, tikibar would show a "Functions" tab that would show the time spent in each timed function.

Closing Tikibar leaves weird negative space at the top of the page.

STR:

1. Open Tikibar on any page.
2. Click on the settings wheel/gear, then Turn off Tikibar for all pages.

Expected: Tikibar should be removed and the page should go back to filling the viewport.
Actual: Tikibar is removed, but there is a weird negative space at the top of the page.

Fix the scrolling jitteryness

On some pages, if you open the Queries timing tab, you see the scroll bar jump around.

Figure out why this happens, and fix it.