Skip to content

Request Profiling

Nautobot offers advanced request profiling through django-silk. This allows administrators to collect debug information about user activities, which can be used to troubleshoot issues with the system.

User Setting

Request profiling may be enabled by individual users in their profile within the web interface. This can be found under the "Advanced Settings" section.

user advanced settings

Once a user enables request profiling, all subsequent HTTP requests made by that specific user to the system will be logged by django-silk. This setting will persist until the user either logs out or disables the setting in their profile.

User Setting Notes

  • While this feature may be visible within the profile configuration, you will only be able to toggle on/off, once the global configuration option ALLOW_REQUEST_PROFILING has been enabled (described further on).

  • Warning! Enabling request profiling on a user will impact the overall performance of Nautobot greatly! It is recommended to disable request profiling for the user when not actively being used.

Silk UI

Nautobot administrators with super-user permissions can access the django-silk UI at the /silk/ URL.

silk ui

From there, administrators can view details of individual requests, including timing, SQL queries, and cProfile artifacts.

Configuration

The Nautobot configuration comes out of the box with django-silk set up to support the above functionality. Those settings are described below, but it is not the intention of the Nautobot docs to describe all django-silk settings. Django-silk provides several other parameters that knowledgeable users may also be able to use, depending on the use case.

ALLOW_REQUEST_PROFILING

Default: False

Global setting to allow or deny users from enabling request profiling on their login session.

SILKY_PYTHON_PROFILER

Default: True

Enables use of the built-in Python cProfile profiler.

SILKY_PYTHON_PROFILER_BINARY

Default: True

Generates a binary .prof file for each profiled request, which can be downloaded.

SILKY_PYTHON_PROFILER_EXTENDED_FILE_NAME

Default: True

Adds part of the request URL path to the profile file name to make it easier to identify specific requests.

SILKY_INTERCEPT_FUNC

Default: nautobot.core.settings.silk_request_logging_intercept_logic

This defines a custom function that filters requests to be profiled. Notably, the default looks for the user session flag described above.

SILKY_AUTHENTICATION

Default: True

Users must be authenticated to access the django-silk UI.

SILKY_AUTHORISATION

Default: True

Users must have permissions to access the django-silk UI. Used in combination with SILKY_AUTHENTICATION.

SILKY_PERMISSIONS

Default: nautobot.core.settings.silk_user_permissions

This ensures the users must be a superuser of the system to access the django-silk UI. Used in combination with SILKY_AUTHENTICATION and SILKY_AUTHORISATION.