Proactive Airflow Monitoring: How to Prevent Infrastructure Issues Before They Happen
Managing the health of mission-critical data pipelines can feel like a constant game of catch-up. For many Airflow users, infrastructure-level Airflow issues like overloaded worker queues, a growing metadata database, and deprecated runtime versions often go unnoticed until they affect production pipelines. Teams have been stuck in reactive mode, relying on fragile custom alerts written directly into DAGs or manual checks that require significant expertise and time to set up. This patchwork approach leads to more downtime, missed SLAs, and time-consuming troubleshooting.
The Pain of Missing Critical Infrastructure Alerts
Without the right alerting systems, even small issues can snowball into critical failures. Many teams, especially those scaling their Airflow usage, lack the infrastructure-level visibility needed to address problems before they escalate. Homegrown alert systems can miss key signals—like when worker queues are at full capacity or the Airflow scheduler is disabled—causing task delays and failures that disrupt workflows and delay insights. This reactive approach increases operational costs, puts a strain on teams, and leaves little room for focus on innovation.
Enter Deployment Health Alerts: A Proactive Solution
Astro’s Deployment Health Alerts are designed to solve this problem by providing out-of-the-box, automated alerts that give teams immediate visibility into their Airflow infrastructure’s health. Deployment Health Alerting monitors key deployment components and sends actionable alerts that notify you when issues arise—before they impact your workflows. These alerts go beyond just flagging a problem; they provide clear, step-by-step guidance on how to resolve it.
For example, if you disable job scheduling in the Airflow scheduler to perform maintenance on a DAG and forget to re-enable job scheduling, Astro will notify you that job scheduling is disabled. The Deployment Health Alert will prompt you to manually trigger a DAG run or remove any overrides to the AIRFLOW__SCHEDULER__USE_JOB_SCHEDULE environment variable, ensuring new jobs aren’t being skipped. Similarly, if a worker queue in a Deployment is running at full capacity, and workers are maxed out on concurrency, Astro will suggest configuration changes like increasing the max number of workers in a queue, to maintain performance.
These proactive, actionable insights help teams to avoid business-critical failures while maintaining operational efficiency. Even for new or growing teams where Airflow expertise might be limited or siloed, Astro provides essential Airflow insights and serves as the first line of defense for your pipelines’ reliability.
How Deployment Health Alerting Helps You Stay Ahead
New Deployments in Astro Hosted automatically receive full coverage of Deployment Health Alerts, which includes the following:
- Airflow Database Storage Unusually High: Prevent scheduler performance issues with recommendations to manage large metadata tables.
- Worker Queue at Capacity: Stay ahead of task delays by adjusting worker configurations when queues hit maximum capacity.
- Job Scheduling Disabled: Get notified when scheduling is disabled, and take action to restore automated workflows.
- Deprecated Runtime Version: Ensure your deployments are running on supported versions by receiving timely alerts to upgrade.
These alerts notify the Deployment creator by default but can be individually customized to notify your existing incident management tools like email, Slack, and PagerDuty. This enables you to respond quickly and efficiently without context-switching, helping you keep your Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) low and your data pipelines running reliably.
The best part? Deployment Health Alerting is automatically turned on for new deployments in Astro, so there's nothing you need to configure. Simply head to the Alerts tab within your Deployment view to see and manage Deployment-level alerts.
Who Benefits Most from Deployment Health Alerting?
- New Airflow Users: Teams just starting with Airflow can immediately benefit from proactive alerts that integrate Airflow best practices without needing to configure custom monitoring solutions.
- Growing Teams: As Airflow usage scales, so do the infrastructure demands. Deployment Health Alerting helps teams avoid common growing pains by flagging issues like resource limits before they become bottlenecks.
- Large Teams and Enterprises: For organizations with multiple teams managing deployments, Deployment Health Alerting ensures reliable pipelines without additional operational overhead, ensuring new Deployments automatically have alerting coverage on common health issues.
Full Visibility with Astro Alerts
In addition to Deployment Health Alerts, other Astro Alerts provide deeper visibility into your DAG and Task-level status. You can set alerts for DAG and Task failures, helping you quickly respond when a job fails or take conditional actions based on success. For example, you can create a DAG Success alert with DAG Trigger as the notification channel, ensuring a downstream DAG is triggered only when an upstream DAG succeeds.
Astro Alerts also allow you to set time-based alerts, such as monitoring Task Duration to detect tasks running longer than expected. Together with Deployment Health Alerts, Astro Alerts give you full visibility into both your deployment-level health and the status of individual jobs, enabling proactive management of your entire Airflow environment.
Take Control of Your Deployment Health
Astro is committed to helping teams manage their Airflow deployments efficiently and reliably. With Deployment Health Alerts, you no longer have to wait for issues to escalate—Deployment Health Alerting keeps you informed and offers actionable solutions before problems arise. Whether you’re just starting with Airflow or scaling to meet enterprise needs, Deployment Health Alerting ensures that your infrastructure remains healthy and performant.
Ready to get started with Deployment Health Alerting? Check out our documentation to explore how Deployment Health Alerting can help you proactively manage your Airflow deployments. First time using Astronomer? Sign up for a free trial of Astro and experience a more reliable and proactive Airflow environment today.
