Collecting

python manage.py collect_insights

All insights are collected in one transaction on the insights database: either everything is replaced, or nothing is. Your own databases are only read, by the queries you write in your insights.

When an insight fails #

An insight that raises an exception is logged (logger django_insights.registry, with the traceback) and reported, the other insights still run. A failed insight rolls back its own writes. The command prints every failed insight and exits with an error:

1 of 14 insights failed

From code, metrics.collect() returns the list of failures. It raises InsightsError (from django_insights.exceptions) when an insight saves duplicates, and keeps the previous data.

In production #

Insights describe your data at the moment you collect, so run the command whenever the dashboard should update, for example every night from cron:

0 3 * * * cd /srv/app && python manage.py collect_insights

The progress bar is hidden when the output is not a terminal, so the command is safe in cron and CI. A non-zero exit code means at least one insight failed: let your monitoring watch for it.