How to monitor API throttling in Django

Question

I am building a solution where I have one core API on which I have implemented the throttling as per the official documentation https://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/throttling/. But I wonder how will I be able to monitor the requests so that no genuine user of the app gets blocked and if so should be able to unblock it.

My settings.py file

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    'DEFAULT_THROTTLE_CLASSES': (
        'rest_framework.throttling.ScopedRateThrottle',
    ),
    'DEFAULT_THROTTLE_RATES': {
        'students': '1/minute',
    }
}

And My views.py

class StudentViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    throttle_scope = 'students'

Answer 1

The throttle classes provided by Django REST framework do not allow you to do this. You would have to create a custom throttle class and overwrite allow_request() to log throttling events and provide some facility for whitelisting. E.g. something like this:

class WhitelistScopedRateThrottle(throttling.ScopedRateThrottle):

    def allow_request(self, request, view):
        allowed = super().allow_request(request, view)
        if not allowed:
            if self.is_whitelisted(request, view)
                return True
            else:
                self.log_throttling(request, view)
                return False
         else:
            return True

    def is_whitelisted(self, request, view):
        ...

    def log_throttling(self, request, view):
        ...

How to best implement the whitelisting and logging depends on your exact requirements.