Configure error alerts and notifications for tasks¶

There are two ways to be notified about task errors:

• A task alert notifies you by email or webhook when the cumulative error rate of your tasks crosses a threshold that you choose.
• ERROR_INTEGRATION pushes a message to a cloud messaging service for each failed task run.

Monitor the task error rate with an alert¶

Snowflake provides a built-in alert template, TASKS_ERROR_RATE, that notifies you by email or webhook when the cumulative error rate of your tasks crosses a threshold that you choose. The template defines the condition and the action for you, so you supply only the threshold, the scope, and the notification target.

An alert tells you that your tasks are failing more often than you’re willing to tolerate. It doesn’t send a message for each failure. If you need that, use ERROR_INTEGRATION instead. See Send a notification for each failed task run.

Task alerts require LOG_EVENT_LEVEL to be set to INFO on the tasks you want to monitor, so that both successful and failed runs are recorded. For details, see Prerequisites for task alerts.

To create the alert, choose the Error rate alert template in the TASKS template group. See Creating a new alert for the Snowsight steps, or Creating an alert from a template with SQL for the SQL equivalent.

The template delivers notifications by email or webhook. To send alert notifications to a cloud provider queue instead, create a custom alert whose action calls SYSTEM$SEND_SNOWFLAKE_NOTIFICATION with a queue notification integration. See Setting up alerts based on data in Snowflake and Sending notifications to cloud provider queues (Amazon SNS, Google Cloud PubSub, and Azure Event Grid).

Send a notification for each failed task run¶

To enable a task to send error notifications, you must associate the task with a notification integration. You can do this when running the CREATE TASK command to create a new task or the ALTER TASK command to modify an existing task. When running these commands, set ERROR_INTEGRATION to the name of the notification integration.

You only specify the error notification integrations on a root task of a task graph. Any failed child task sends error notifications to the root task’s specified integration.

Tasks with TASK_AUTO_RETRY_ATTEMPTS set to a value greater than 0 send error notifications for each failed task run.

Create a new task that sends error notifications¶

Create a new task using CREATE TASK. For descriptions of all available task parameters, see the SQL command topic:

CREATE TASK <name>
  [...]
  ERROR_INTEGRATION = <integration_name>
  AS <sql>

Where:

ERROR_INTEGRATION = integration_name

Specifies the name of a notification integration created using CREATE NOTIFICATION INTEGRATION. For more information, see AWS SNS, Google Pub/Sub, or Azure Event Grid.

The following example creates a serverless task that supports error notifications. The task inserts the current timestamp into a table column every 5 minutes:

CREATE TASK mytask
  SCHEDULE = '5 MINUTE'
  ERROR_INTEGRATION = my_notification_int
  AS
  INSERT INTO mytable(ts) VALUES(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP);

Update an existing task to send error notifications¶

Modify an existing task using ALTER TASK:

ALTER TASK <name> SET ERROR_INTEGRATION = <integration_name>;

Where integration_name is the name of the notification integration created in one of AWS SNS, Google Pub/Sub, or Azure Event Grid platform level notifications.

For example:

ALTER TASK mytask SET ERROR_INTEGRATION = my_notification_int;

Task error notification message payload¶

The body of error messages identifies the task and the errors encountered during a task run.

The following is a sample message payload describing a task error. The payload can include one or more error messages.

{\"version\":\"1.0\",\"messageId\":\"3ff1eff0-7ad7-493c-9552-c0307087e0c6\",\"messageType\":\"USER_TASK_FAILED\",\"timestamp\":\"2021-11-11T19:46:39.648Z\",\"accountName\":\"AWS_UTEN_DPO_ACC\",\"taskName\":\"AWS_UTEN_DPO_DB.AWS_UTEN_SC.UTEN_AWS_TK1\",\"taskId\":\"01a03962-2b57-889e-0000-000000000001\",\"rootTaskName\":\"AWS_UTEN_DPO_DB.AWS_UTEN_SC.UTEN_AWS_TK1\",\"rootTaskId\":\"01a03962-2b57-889e-0000-000000000001\",\"messages\":[{\"runId\":\"2021-11-11T19:46:23.826Z\",\"scheduledTime\":\"2021-11-11T19:46:23.826Z\",\"queryStartTime\":\"2021-11-11T19:46:24.879Z\",\"completedTime\":\"null\",\"queryId\":\"01a03962-0300-0002-0000-0000000034d8\",\"errorCode\":\"000630\",\"errorMessage\":\"Statement reached its statement or warehouse timeout of 10 second(s) and was canceled.\"}]}

Note that you must parse the string into a JSON object to process values in the payload.