API request tracing with NextJS, Nginx and Django

Question

I’m trying to measure the exact time spent in each stage of my API request flow — starting from the browser, through Nginx, into Django, then the database, and back out through Django and Nginx to the client.

Essentially, I want to capture timestamps and time intervals for:

When the browser sends the request
When Nginx receives it
When Django starts processing it
Time spent in the database
Django response time
Nginx response time
When the browser receives the response

Is there any Django package or recommended approach that can help log these timing metrics end-to-end? Currently I have to manually add timestamps in nginx conf file, django middleware, before and after the fetch call in the frontend. There is Datadog but for now I want a django lightweight solution.

Thanks!

Ivan Shatsky · Accepted Answer · 2025-11-25 07:38:50Z

1

django-silk

It is usefull in your case:

lightweight
native
no heavy setup

Let me know you want a setup for that or you can figure out.

edited Nov 25 at 7:38

Ivan Shatsky

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answered Nov 25 at 6:07

Lucifer

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Ivan Shatsky · Accepted Answer · 2025-11-25 07:53:20Z

1

Additionally to the already recommended Django middleware, you can log the following nginx internal variables:

$upstream_connect_time (the time taken to establish a connection with an upstream application server);
$upstream_response_time (the time from establishing a connection to an upstream server until the last byte of the response body is received from that server);
$request_time (represents the total time elapsed for a request, from the first byte read from the client to the last byte of the response body sent).

answered Nov 25 at 7:53

Ivan Shatsky

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2 Comments

Smruti Ranjan Sahu Nov 25 at 15:57

For the nginx part, I am currently using the variables you have mentioned. But I am looking for a package or module that would kind of do both - django profiling as well as nginx monitoring / logging since going through the nginx access log, parsing the variables etc is a bit tedious if the number of requests is large. Are you aware of any such package / module?

Ivan Shatsky 2 days ago

I don't think such a package/module exists. However, if you want to track a relationship between the nginx access log entries and django-silk reports, you can try to utilize the $request_id nginx variable, adding it to nginx log and passing it to the Django app (as a WSGI environment variable using uwsgi_param or as a custom HTTP request header using proxy_set_header, depending on your backend application server architecture).

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