Monitor your celery application from within AWS CloudWatch!

The following events are tallied per task:

• CeleryEventSent
• CeleryEventStarted
• CeleryEventSucceeded
• CeleryEventFailed

You can then see how many tasks/day, tasks/week etc are being completed.

Also, we record the total waiting/running per task:

• CeleryNumWaiting
• CeleryNumRunning

Also, statistics on task duration are sent in the metrics:

• CeleryWaitingTime
• CeleryProcessingTime

These metrics are sent with all supported stats (No. Events, Sum, Max, Min), allowing you to gain insight into your task processing and match requests and capacity.

1. Set up an IAM Role for your instance.

   It must include a policy to perform 'PutMetricData', eg:

   {
     "Version": "2000-01-01",
     "Statement": [
       {
         "Effect": "Allow",
         "Action": [
           "cloudwatch:PutMetricData"
         ],
         "Resource": [
           "*"
         ]
       }
     ]
   }
   

   (Note: Alternatively, you can set up a User with the same policy and provide access details that way)

2. Install via python-pip (and upgrade pip & boto)

   sudo apt-get install -y python3-pip
   python3 -m pip install --user -U pip
   
   mkdir -p /opt/ccwatch
   virtualenv --python python3 /opt/ccwatch/env
   /opt/ccwatch/env/bin/pip install celery-cloudwatch
   sudo chown -R nobody:nogroup /opt/ccwatch

3. Create your own boto.cfg at /etc/boto.cfg-

   [Credentials]
   # if not using an IAM Role - provide aws key/secret
   aws_access_key_id = xxx
   aws_secret_access_key = yyy
   
   [Boto]
   cloudwatch_region_name = my-region
   cloudwatch_region_endpoint = monitoring.my-region.amazonaws.com
   
   

4. Create your own config file in /etc/ccwatch.yaml

   ccwatch:
     broker: null
     camera: celery_cloudwatch.CloudWatchCamera
     verbose: no
   camera:
     frequency: 60.0
     verbose: no
   cloudwatch-camera:
     dryrun: no
     namespace: celery
     tasks:
       - myapp.mytasks.taskname
       - myapp.mytasks.anothertask
       - myapp.mytasks.thirdtask
       - name: myapp.secondarytasks
         dimensions:
           task: myapp.secondarytasks
           customDim: value
       - name: myapp.tertiarytasks
         dimensions:
           task: myapp.tertiarytasks
           customDim: value
   
   

   And /etc/ccwatch.logging.conf

   [loggers]
   keys=root,ccwatch
   
   [handlers]
   keys=consoleHandler
   
   [formatters]
   keys=simpleFormatter
   
   [logger_root]
   level=WARN
   handlers=consoleHandler
   
   [logger_ccwatch]
   level=DEBUG
   handlers=consoleHandler
   qualname=ccwatch
   propagate=0
   
   [handler_consoleHandler]
   class=StreamHandler
   level=DEBUG
   formatter=simpleFormatter
   args=(sys.stdout,)
   
   [formatter_simpleFormatter]
   format=%(asctime)s - %(name)s - %(levelname)s - %(message)s
   datefmt=
   

5. Install systemd configuration

   Create a file /etc/systemd/system/ccwatch.service-

   [Unit]
   Description="Celery CloudWatch"
   
   [Service]
   Restart=always
   RestartSec=15
   User=nobody
   Group=nobody
   Environment=AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=my-region
   ExecStart=/opt/ccwatch/env/bin/ccwatch
   
   [Install]
   WantedBy=multi-user.target
   

   then-

   systemctl daemon-reload
   systemctl enable ccwatch.service
   systemctl start ccwatch.service

6. Start Celery your celery workers with the -E (or CELERY_SEND_EVENTS=1 and CELERY_TRACK_STARTED=1) options, and, start celery clients with CELERY_SEND_TASK_SENT_EVENT=1

7. All done! head over to your CloudWatch monitoring page to see the results!