My Airflow Scheduler went down for some reason, and when I re-started it, all the DAGS triggered simultaneously. It was as if it was catching up from the missed jobs. Also, it seems when I modify a DAG, the workflow triggers. These unexpected triggers corrupt my data and loses trust in the system.
Is there a way to prevent a DAG running unexpectedly unless it is the exact time (no catch-up) or unless it is manually triggered?
The airflow scheduler will, at a minimum, attempt to run the current schedule interval when it is online to do so. This means that if the scheduler process is offline for a period of time, when it comes back online it will reconcile which jobs should have run and attempt to start those jobs.
There is some control using catchup, which tells the scheduler that only the latest job should be run and schedule intervals other than the latest that were missed do not need to be run.
Some info on catchup here: https://airflow.apache.org/docs/apache-airflow/stable/dag-run.html#catchup
Is there a way to prevent a DAG running unexpectedly unless it is the exact time (no catch-up) or unless it is manually triggered?
There is no way to tell Airflow to only attempt to schedule the job at the exact time the job is supposed to run (and never attempt again after the fact). You can set the schedule interval to None and the job will never be scheduled, however. You can manually trigger the job through the UI or via the Airflow API in this case.
https://airflow.apache.org/docs/apache-airflow/stable/dag-run.html#cron-presets
preset | meaning
-------+----------------------------------------------------------------
None | Don’t schedule, use for exclusively “externally triggered” DAGs
As screenshot:
Any idea why this would occur, and how would I go about troubleshooting it?
--
Update:
It's "none status" not "queued" as I originally interpreted
The DAG run occurred on 3/8 and last relevant commit was on 3/1. But I'm having trouble finding the same DAG run....will keep investigating
It's not Queued status. It's None status.
This can happen in one of the following cases:
The task drop_staging_table_if_exists was added after create_staging_table started to run.
The task drop_staging_table_if_exists used to have a different task_id in the past.
The task drop_staging_table_if_exists was somewhere else in the workflow and you changed the dependencies after the DAG run started.
Note Airflow currently doesn't support DAG versioning (It will be supported in future versions when AIP-36 DAG Versioning is completed) This means that Airflow constantly reload the DAG structure, so changes that you make will also be reflected on past runs - This is by design! and it's very useful for cases where you want to backfill past runs.
Either way, if you will start a new run or clear this specific run the issue you are facing will be resolved.
We have an ETL DAG which is executed daily. DAG and tasks have the following parameters:
catchup=False
max_active_runs=1
depends_on_past=True
When we add a new task, due to depends_on_past property, no new DAG runs get scheduled, as all previous states for new task are missing.
We would like to avoid having to run manual backfill or manually marking previous runs from UI as it can be easily forgotten, and we also have some dynamic DAGs where tasks get added automatically and halt future DAG executions.
Is there a way to automatically set past executions for new tasks as skipped by default, or some other approach that will allow future DAG runs to execute without human intervention?
We also considered creating a maintenance DAG that would insert missing task executions with skipped state, but would rather not go this route.
Are we missing something as the flow looks like a common thing to do?
Defined in Airflow documentation on BaseOperator:
depends_on_past (bool) – when set to true, task instances will run
sequentially and only if the previous instance has succeeded or has
been skipped. The task instance for the start_date is allowed to run.
As long as there exists a previous instance of the task, if that previous instance is not in the success state, the current instance of the task cannot run.
When adding a task to a DAG with existing dagrun, Airflow will create the missing task instances in the None state for all dagruns. Unfortunately, it is not possible to set the default state of task instances.
I do not believe there is a way to allow future task instances of a DAG with existing dagruns to run without human intervention. Personally, for depends_on_past enabled tasks, I will mark the previous task instance as success either through the CLI or the Airflow UI.
Looks like there is an Github Issue describing exactly what you are experiencing! Feel free to bump this PR or take a stab at it if you would like.
A hacky solution is to set depends_on_past to False as max_active_runs=1 will implicitly guarantee the same behavior. As of the current Airflow version, the scheduler orders both dag runs and task instances by execution date before running them (checked 1.10.x but also 2.0)
Another difference is that next execution will be scheduled even if previous fails. We solved this by retrying unlimited times (setting a ver large number), and alert if retry number is larger than some value.
We are currently evaluating airflow for a project. I was wondering if there is a way to stop/start individual dagruns while running a DAG multiple times in parallel. Pause/unpause on dag_id seems to pause/unpause all the dagruns under a dag. Instead we want to pause individual dagruns (or tasks within them). Let me know if this is achievable in airflow.
If its not possible, here are other alternatives I am thinking of, let me know your opinion on these
Change task state. – Change all tasks under a dagrun to Mark Failed or Success. That way that particular dagrun is stopped on its tracks without affecting other dagruns.
Airflow sensor to pull this information from s3 or http or sql or somewhere to pause current dagrun. And have a task to check on s3 everytime if this dagrun needs to be stopped (not other dagruns).
subdags. - Can we pause/unpause subdags. That way for each parallel user's request we want to do we issue a subdag and we can pause userAs subdag without impacting other user’s subdags.
There's nothing "baked" into Airflow to support this but you could (ab)use the state of the DagRun by changing it to "failed" to pause and then back to "running" to resume; you won't be able to blanket unpause but for testing it should be workable.
Airflow is randomly not running queued tasks some tasks dont even get queued status. I keep seeing below in the scheduler logs
[2018-02-28 02:24:58,780] {jobs.py:1077} INFO - No tasks to consider for execution.
I do see tasks in database that either have no status or queued status but they never get started.
The airflow setup is running https://github.com/puckel/docker-airflow on ECS with Redis. There are 4 scheduler threads and 4 Celery worker tasks. For the tasks that are not running are showing in queued state (grey icon) when hovering over the task icon operator is null and task details says:
All dependencies are met but the task instance is not running. In most cases this just means that the task will probably be scheduled soon unless:- The scheduler is down or under heavy load
Metrics on scheduler do not show heavy load. The dag is very simple with 2 independent tasks only dependent on last run. There are also tasks in the same dag that are stuck with no status (white icon).
Interesting thing to notice is when I restart the scheduler tasks change to running state.
Airflow can be a bit tricky to setup.
Do you have the airflow scheduler running?
Do you have the airflow webserver running?
Have you checked that all DAGs you want to run are set to On in the web ui?
Do all the DAGs you want to run have a start date which is in the past?
Do all the DAGs you want to run have a proper schedule which is shown in the web ui?
If nothing else works, you can use the web ui to click on the dag, then on Graph View. Now select the first task and click on Task Instance. In the paragraph Task Instance Details you will see why a DAG is waiting or not running.
I've had for instance a DAG which was wrongly set to depends_on_past: True which forbid the current instance to start correctly.
Also a great resource directly in the docs, which has a few more hints: Why isn't my task getting scheduled?.
I'm running a fork of the puckel/docker-airflow repo as well, mostly on Airflow 1.8 for about a year with 10M+ task instances. I think the issue persists in 1.9, but I'm not positive.
For whatever reason, there seems to be a long-standing issue with the Airflow scheduler where performance degrades over time. I've reviewed the scheduler code, but I'm still unclear on what exactly happens differently on a fresh start to kick it back into scheduling normally. One major difference is that scheduled and queued task states are rebuilt.
Scheduler Basics in the Airflow wiki provides a concise reference on how the scheduler works and its various states.
Most people solve the scheduler diminishing throughput problem by restarting the scheduler regularly. I've found success at a 1-hour interval personally, but have seen as frequently as every 5-10 minutes used too. Your task volume, task duration, and parallelism settings are worth considering when experimenting with a restart interval.
For more info see:
Airflow: Tips, Tricks, and Pitfalls (section "The scheduler should be restarted frequently")
Bug 1286825 - Airflow scheduler stopped working silently
Airflow at WePay (section "Restart everything when deploying DAG changes.")
This used to be addressed by restarting every X runs using the SCHEDULER_RUNS config setting, although that setting was recently removed from the default systemd scripts.
You might also consider posting to the Airflow dev mailing list. I know this has been discussed there a few times and one of the core contributors may be able to provide additional context.
Related Questions
Airflow tasks get stuck at "queued" status and never gets running (especially see Bolke's answer here)
Jobs not executing via Airflow that runs celery with RabbitMQ
Make sure you don't have datetime.now() as your start_date
It's intuitive to think that if you tell your DAG to start "now" that it'll execute "now." BUT, that doesn't take into account how Airflow itself actually reads datetime.now().
For a DAG to be executed, the start_date must be a time in the past, otherwise Airflow will assume that it's not yet ready to execute. When Airflow evaluates your DAG file, it interprets datetime.now() as the current timestamp (i.e. NOT a time in the past) and decides that it's not ready to run. Since this will happen every time Airflow heartbeats (evaluates your DAG) every 5-10 seconds, it'll never run.
To properly trigger your DAG to run, make sure to insert a fixed time in the past (e.g. datetime(2019,1,1)) and set catchup=False (unless you're looking to run a backfill).
By design, an Airflow DAG will execute at the completion of its schedule_interval
That means one schedule_interval AFTER the start date. An hourly DAG, for example, will execute its 2pm run when the clock strikes 3pm. The reasoning here is that Airflow can't ensure that all data corresponding to the 2pm interval is present until the end of that hourly interval.
This is a peculiar aspect to Airflow, but an important one to remember - especially if you're using default variables and macros.
Time in Airflow is in UTC by default
This shouldn't come as a surprise given that the rest of your databases and APIs most likely also adhere to this format, but it's worth clarifying.
Full article and source here
I also had a similar issue, but it is mostly related to SubDagOperator with more than 3000 task instances in total (30 tasks * 44 subdag tasks).
What I found out is that airflow scheduler mainly responsible for putting your scheduled tasks in to "Queued Slots" (pool), while airflow celery workers is the one who pick up your queued task and put it into the "Used Slots" (pool) and run it.
Based on your description, your scheduler should work fine. I suggest you check your "celery workers" log to see whether there is any error, or restart it to see whether it helps or not. I experienced some issues that celery workers normally go on strike for a few minutes then start working again (especially on SubDagOperator)
One of the very silly reasons could be that the DAG is "paused" which is the default state for the first time. I lost around 2 hrs fighting it. If you are using Airflow Web interface, then this shows up as a toggle next to your DAG in the list
I am facing the issue today and found that bullet point 4 from tobi6 answer below worked out and resolved the issue
*'Do all the DAGs you want to run have a start date which is in the past?'*
I am using airflow version v1.10.3
My problem was one step further, in addition to my tasks being queued, I couldn't see any of my celery workers on the Flower UI. The solution was that, since I was running my celery worker as root I had to make changes in my ~/.bashrc file.
The following steps made it work:
Add export C_FORCE_ROOT=true to your ~/.bashrc file
source ~/.bashrc
Run worker : nohup airflow worker $* >> ~/airflow/logs/worker.logs &
Check your Flower UI at http://{HOST}:5555
I think it's worth mentioning that there's an open issue that can cause tasks to fail to run with no obvious reason: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AIRFLOW-5506
The problem seems to occur when using LocalScheduler connected to a PostgreSQL airflow db, and results in the scheduler logging a number of "Killing PID xxxx" lines. Check the scheduler logs after the DAGs have been stalled without starting any new tasks for a while.
You can try to stop the webserver and the scheduler:
ps -ef | grep airflow #show the process id
kill 1234 #kill the webserver
kill 5678 #kill the scheduler
Remove the files from the airflow folder if they exist (they will be created again):
airflow-scheduler.err
airflow-scheduler.pid
airflow-webserver.err
airflow-webserver.pid
Start the webserver and the scheduler again.
airflow webserver -D
airflow scheduler -D
-D will make the services run in the background.
I had a similar issue of a triggered DAG "running" indefinitely because its first task stuck in "queued" state.
I realized this was because of a "ghost" DAG that actually changed name. It seems that since the DAG has run in the past (had data in the postgresDG) and was referenced as child-DAG in other DAGs, the trigger of the parent DAGs referencing the old name would "resurrect" the old DAG name, but with the new code. Indeed the old DAG name and new DAG code did not match, thus producing an "infinite queued execution" bug.
Solution:
Delete the all the previous DAG runs of the previous DAG-runs with the old name
Restart everything (webserver, worker, executor,...) OR Delete relevant DAGs (with the "delete DAG" button in the UI).
The interpretation of the bug can vary but this fix worked in my case.
One more thing to check is whether "the concurrency parameter of your DAG reached?".
I'd experienced the same situation when some task was shown as NO STATUS.
It turned out that my File_Sensor tasks were run with timeout set up to 1 week, while DAG time out was only 5 hours. That leaded to the case when the Files were missing, many sensors tasked were running at the same time. Which results the concurrency overloaded!
The depending tasks couldn't be started before the sensor task succeed, when the dag timeout, they got NO STATUS.
My solution:
Carefully set tasks and DAG timeout
Increase dag_concurrency in airflow.cfg file in AIRFLOW_HOME folder.
Please refer to the docs.
https://airflow.apache.org/faq.html#why-isn-t-my-task-getting-scheduled
I believe this is an issue with celery version 4.2.1 and redis 3.0.1 as described here:
https://github.com/celery/celery/issues/3808
we resolved the issue by downgrading our redis version 2.10.6:
redis==2.10.6
In my case, tasks were not being launched because I had for all operators a pool configured and hadn't created it, hence, tasks were not even scheduled. An operator looks like:
foo = DummyOperator(
task_id='foo',
dag=dag,
pool='capser'
)
To create a pool go to Admin > Pools > Create and set slots, for example, 128, which runs successfully for me. You can also configure by using the CLI.
counter intuitive UI message!
I have spent days on this. So want to elaborate on my specific issue (s).
Each dag has a state. By default the state could be 'pause' or 'not pause'.
The first confusion arises from - what is the default state on startup? The UI message attached seems to indicate that the state is 'not pause' and on clicking the toggle, it pauses.
In reality, the default state is 'pause'. This state can be controlled by settings, environment variables, parameters and UI. I have detailed them below.
The second confusion arises because of the UI again. When we manually trigger a dag which is in the pause state. The UI shows the dag as running (green circle)! But the dag is actually in the 'pause' state. The tasks will not execute unless it is 'un-paused'.
If we read the task instance details. The message would be
Task is in the 'None' state which is not a valid state for execution. The task must be cleared in order to be run.
What is the 'None' state!? And clear which task?!
The actual problem is that the dag is in the pause state. On toggling the dag state the tasks would start to execute.
The pause state of the dag can be changed by
clicking the button on the UI.
set your particular dag to run, by adding the below parameter to your dag
DAG(dag_id='your-dag', is_paused_upon_creation=True)
setting the config variable in airflow.cfg file. (caution: this will start all your dags including the example ones)
dags_are_paused_at_creation = FALSE
configuring an environment variable before starting up the scheduler/webserver.(caution: this will start all your dags including the example ones)
AIRFLOW__CORE__DAGS_ARE_PAUSED_AT_CREATION=False
Make sure that your task is assigned to the same queue, that your workers is listening to. This means that in your DAG file you have to set 'queue': 'queue_name' and in your worker configuration you have to set either default_queue = 'queue_name' in the airflow.cfg or AIRFLOW__OPERATORS__DEFAULT_QUEUE: 'queue_name' in the docker-compose.yaml (in case you're using Docker).