Request Context

Talisker uses an implicit context to track requests during execution. It does this via the contextvars module from the Python standard library in Python 3.7+, falling back to the contextvars backport from PyPI. It also includes a minimal backport of ContextVar for use with Python 2.

Talisker creates a new context for each WSGI request or Celery job, and tracks the request id and other data in that context, such as timeout data. Asyncio is supported, either by the native support in python 3.7, or via the aiocontextvars package, which you can install by using the asyncio extra:

pip install talisker[asyncio]

Note: you need at least python 3.5.3+ to use asyncio with contextvars - aiocontextvars does not work on earlier versions.

Talisker also explicitly supports contexts when using the Gevent or Eventlet Gunicorn workers, by swapping the thread local storage out for the relative greenlet based storage. This support currently does not work in python 3.7 or above, as it is not possible to switch the underlying storage in the stdlib version of the contextvars library.

Request Id

One of the key elements of the context is to track the current request id. This id can be supplied via a the X-Request-Id header, or else a uuid4 is used.

This id is automatically attached to all log messages emitted during the request, as well as the detailed log message talisker emits for the request itself.

Talisker also support propagating this request id wherever possible. When using Talisker’s requests support, the current request id will be included in the outgoing request headers. When queuing celery jobs, the current request id will be passed as a header for that job, and then used by the job for all log messages when the job runs.

This allows deep tracing of a particular request id across multiple services boundaries, which is key to debugging complex issues in distributed systems.

Context API

Talisker exposes a public API for the current context.

from talisker import Context

Context.request_id          # get/set current request id
Context.clear()             # clear the current context
Context.new()               # create a new context

# you can also add extras to the current logging context

Context.logging.push(foo=1)

# or

with Context.logging(bar=2):
    ...