An introduction to the Airflow UI

One of the main features of Apache Airflow is its user interface (UI), which provides insights into your DAGs and DAG runs. The UI is essential for understanding, monitoring, and troubleshooting your pipelines.

This guide is an overview of some of the most useful features and visualizations in the Airflow UI. If you're not already using Airflow and want to get it up and running to follow along, see Install the Astro CLI to quickly run Airflow locally.

This guide is based off of the 3.0 UI. If you are on a different version, some elements may be slightly different. Make sure you upgrade your Airflow environment frequently to ensure you are taking advantage of Airflow UI updates as the community releases them.

Assumed knowledge​

To get the most out of this guide, you should have an understanding of:

• Basic Airflow concepts. See Introduction to Apache Airflow.
• Airflow DAGs. See Introduction to Airflow DAGs.

Home​

The Home view is the landing page when you sign in to Airflow. It is a great resource for seeing how your Airflow environment is doing at a quick glance.

In the Home view you can:

• See the overall health of your Airflow environment
• Go straight to your Failed, Running, or Active DAGs from quick links
• See / Filter the history of your DAG runs & task instances at a glancea
• See the Asset Events at a glance

DAGs​

The DAGs view is the overall view for the DAGs in your Airflow environment. It shows a list of all your DAGs, the status of recent DAG runs and tasks, the time of the last DAG run, and basic metadata about the DAG like the owner and the schedule.

You can also view the DAG screen as a list:

In the DAGs view you can:

• Pause / Unpause a DAG

• Trigger a manual DAG run

• Filter your DAG list by All, Failed, Running, or Successful

• Filter your DAG list by Enabled / Disabled

• Filter your DAG list by tag

• Sort by latest run, next run, alphabetical, and more

To see more information about a specific DAG, click its name or use one of the links.

Individual DAG view​

The individual DAG view gives you detailed insights into a specific DAG, including its DAG runs and task instances. You can also trigger a backfill, or reparse the dag.

On the left side you can see a grid representation of the DAG's previous runs, including their duration and the outcome of all individual task instances. Each column represents a DAG run, and each square represents a task instance in that DAG run. Task instances are color-coded according to their status. A small play icon on a DAG run indicates that a run was triggered manually, and a small dataset icon shows that a run was triggered by a asset update. If no icon is shown, the DAG ran according to its schedule.

On the right side, you can see a detailed overview of the DAG. You can also look into other dag-specific information.

This includes:

• Overview of the runs
• Overview of the created asset events
• Filter by past 1 hour, 12 hours, 24 hours, or 1 week

When a DAG run, task instance, or task group instance is selected in the DAG grid, you can look at the information including:

• Overview
• Task instances
• Related events

There are several tabs available within the individual DAG view:

• Overview: Shows summary details about the DAG runs, and asset events.
• Runs: Shows a list of runs with detailed information.
• Tasks: Shows detailed info about the DAG tasks.
• Backfills: Lists detailed info about any backfills that have been run.
• Events: Detailed information about any events related to the DAG.
• Code: Shows the code for the DAG.
• Details: Detailed information about the DAG itself.

Overview​

The Overview tab displays a basic overview of the DAG, including a look at the recent DAG runs, and related asset events.

This can be filtered by the past 1 hour, 12 hours, 24 hours, or 1 week.

Runs​

The Runs tab shows detailed information about the runs of the DAG. This information includes the 'run after' date, the state, run type, start / end date, duration, and the DAG version that was run.

You can filter this list by state or run type.

Tasks​

The Tasks Tab details out information on all of the tasks in the DAG. This information includes the task names, the operator type, the trigger rule, last run info, and a visual chart of runs.

You can click the individual task names, and it will take you to the task overview page.

Backfills​

Under the Backfills tab you can see detailed information about the backfills that were run on the dag. This includes information on when it was run from / to, the reprocess behavior, when it was created and completed, the duration, and the max active runs.

Events​

The Events tab shows a list of events that have occurred in your Airflow environment relating to the DAG, DAG run or task instance you have selected.

You can sort the events by when, run ID, task ID, event, and user.

Code​

The Code tab allows you to inspect the code for the dag itself. It also shows the date and time of the last parse.

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You can select which dag version you want to see, and copy the code. You can also select whether to word-wrap or not.

Details​

The Details tab displays the detailed information about the DAG. This includes information such as the dag ID, description, timezone, file location, last parsed time, latest version information, and start time. You can also see dag configuration information such as the concurrency number, max active runs / tasks, if catchup is enabled, and any params.

Assets Tab​

The assets tab allows you to see a list of the Assets associated with your airflow instance. The main view includes the asset name, group, consuming dags, producing tasks, and a button to create an asset event manually.

You can also use the search function at the top to find assets manually.

Clicking on the button under the consuming dag and producting tasks allows you to to see it's association.

You can also click on the asset name, and it will take you to the individual asset screen with information on that specific asset.

Individual Asset View​

On the left of the individual asset view, you can see the graph of the asset.

On the right sie of the individual asset view, you can see information on the assets group, producing tasks, and consuming dags. You can also see the list of events for that specific asset.

You can also create a manual asset event from this screen.

There are two types of ways to create event:

• Materialize: trigger the dag upstream of this asset.
• Manual: Directly create the asset event.

Browse Tab​

The Browse tab is where you will find detailed information from your Audit Log, and about your XComs.

When you click on the Browse tab, you'll be prompted to select either your Audit Log, or XCom information.

Going into the Audit Log provides a detailed listing of all of your logging events. This includes information such as when the event occured, the dag / run / task ID's, the Map INdex, the Try Number, the event type, and the user associated with the event.

The other option under the Browse Tab is the XCom information. This provides detailed information about your XComs including the key, dag, run / task ID's, Map Index, and the Value. For more information on XComs, check out the documentation here.

Admin tab​

The Admin tab links to pages for content related to Airflow administration that are not specific to any particular DAG. Many of these pages can be used to both view and modify your Airflow environment.

For example, the Connections page shows all Airflow connections stored in your environment. Click Add Connection to add a new connection. For more information, see Managing your Connections in Apache Airflow.

Similarly, the Providers page allows you to view all Airflow providers included in your Airflow environment with their version number.

Other pages on the Admin tab include:

• Variables: View and manage Airflow variables.
• Pools: View and manage Airflow pools.
• Plugins: View any Airflow plugins defined in your environment.
• Config: View the contents of your airflow.cfg file. Note that this can be disabled by your Airflow admin for security reasons.

Docs​

The Docs tab provides links to external Airflow resources including:

• Airflow documentation
• The Airflow website
• The Airflow GitHub repo
• The REST API Swagger and the Redoc documentation

User Tab​

The bottom-most icon on the navigation is the User Tab. This allows you to:

• Toggle Light / Dark Mode
• Deafult to Graph View
• Select the Time Zone for the instance
• Logout

Conclusion​

This guide provided a basic overview of some of the most commonly used features of the Airflow UI. As you can see, the UI has become much more easy and intuitive from 2.x to 3.0.

The Airflow community is consistently working on improvements to the UI to provide a better user experience and additional functionality. Make sure you upgrade your Airflow environment frequently to ensure you are taking advantage of Airflow UI updates as the community releases them.