Set up alerts and notifications for tasks

Snowflake can notify you when tasks run into errors, and when a task graph finishes successfully. You can do this in two ways, and you can use both at the same time:

  • A task alert notifies you by email or webhook when the error rate across your tasks crosses a threshold that you choose. Use this to monitor the health of your tasks. See Configure error alerts and notifications for tasks.
  • A notification integration pushes a message to Amazon SNS, Microsoft Azure Event Grid, or Google Pub/Sub for each individual task failure, and for each successful task graph run. Use this to feed task events into downstream systems. See Send task notifications to a cloud messaging service.

For more information about alerts, see Setting up alerts based on data in Snowflake.

Prerequisites for task alerts

Task alerts read task execution events from the event table, and calculate the error rate as the number of failed runs divided by the number of recorded runs. Successful runs must be recorded too, or the error rate is overstated. For example, if only failures are recorded, one failure in 100 runs is evaluated as a 100% error rate instead of 1%.

Before you create a task alert, set the LOG_EVENT_LEVEL parameter to INFO on every task that you want to monitor. At INFO, events are recorded for both successful and failed task runs. You can set this parameter on an individual task, on the schema or database that contains the tasks, or on the account. For more information, see Set the severity level of the events to capture.

The role that owns the alert also needs privileges on the views in the ACCOUNT_USAGE schema that the alert queries. For both requirements, see Prerequisites for task alerts.

Important

Set LOG_EVENT_LEVEL to INFO, DEBUG, or TRACE for the tasks that you want to monitor. At WARN or ERROR, only failed runs are recorded, so the alert overstates the error rate. At OFF, which is the default, no task events are recorded, so the alert never fires.

Send task notifications to a cloud messaging service

Task integration is implemented using notification integration objects, which provide an interface between Snowflake and third-party cloud message queuing services.

Snowflake guarantees at-least-once message delivery of notifications. Multiple attempts are made to deliver messages to ensure at least one attempt succeeds, which can result in duplicate messages.

This feature is supported for both serverless tasks and user-managed tasks, which are tasks that rely on a virtual warehouse to provide the compute resources.

Notifications rely on cloud messaging that uses one of the following services:

  • Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
  • Microsoft Azure Event Grid
  • Google Pub/Sub

Currently, cross-cloud support isn’t available for push notifications. You must configure notification support for the messaging service that is provided by the cloud platform where your Snowflake account is hosted.

Note

The email and webhook notification integration types aren’t supported for ERROR_INTEGRATION or SUCCESS_INTEGRATION. To receive task notifications by email or webhook, use a task alert instead. See Configure error alerts and notifications for tasks.

You can use the NOTIFICATION_HISTORY table function to query the history of task notifications. For more information, see NOTIFICATION_HISTORY.

To set up task notifications, complete the following steps:

  1. Create a topic to receive the notifications, and set up a notification integration for that topic.

    For more information, see the instructions for your platform:

  2. Create or configure the task to use the notification integration for error and success notifications.

    See Configure error alerts and notifications for tasks and Configure a task to send success notifications.