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Nextflow Observability and Monitoring

· One min read

Observability becomes both harder and critically important when moving from running small pipelines on laptops to running big pipelines in the cloud.

For example, while a pipeline is running, how do you figure out:

  1. What's running right now?
  2. Is it stuck?
  3. What's happening right now? Are there critical warnings?
  4. Did a task actually succeed?

To make monitoring and observability easier, we added log and activity metric collection to FlowDeploy.

Pipeline tasks (What's running right now?)​

View all tasks for the run, and view the details of any task.

Activity monitor (Is it stuck?)​

Check how a task uses resources with an activity monitor that shows both CPU and memory usage for the past fifteen minutes.

Live logs (What's happening right now?)​

View raw logs live, for the base Nextflow orchestrator and all parallel tasks.

Task log files (Did this step actually succeed?)​

Check the output of completed tasks from within the FlowDeploy app, even while the pipeline is still running.