Best approach to check if Spark streaming jobs are hanging - apache-spark

Question

I have Spark streaming application which basically gets a trigger message from Kafka which kick starts the batch processing which could potentially take up to 2 hours.
There were incidents where some of the jobs were hanging indefinitely and didn't get completed within the usual time and currently there is no way we could figure out the status of the job without checking the Spark UI manually. I want to have a way where the currently running spark jobs are hanging or not. So basically if it's hanging for more than 30 minutes I want to notify the users so they can take an action. What all options do I have?
I see I can use metrics from driver and executors. If I were to choose the most important one, it would be the last received batch records. When StreamingMetrics.streaming.lastReceivedBatch_records == 0 it probably means that Spark streaming job has been stopped or failed.
But in my scenario, I will receive only 1 streaming trigger event and then it will kick start the processing which may take up to 2 hours so I won't be able to rely on the records received.
Is there a better way? TIA

Answer 1

YARN provides the REST API to check the status of application and status of cluster resource utilization as well.
with API call it will give a list of running applications and their start times and other details. you can have simple REST client that triggers maybe once in every 30 min or so and check if the job is running for more than 2 hours then send a simple mail alert.
Here is the API documentation:
https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r2.7.3/hadoop-yarn/hadoop-yarn-site/ResourceManagerRest.html#Cluster_Applications_API

Answer 2

Maybe a simple solution like.
At the start of the processing - launch a waiting thread.
val TWO_HOURS = 2 * 60 * 60 * 1000
val t = new Thread(new Runnable {
override def run(): Unit = {
try {
Thread.sleep(TWO_HOURS)
// send an email that job didn't end
} catch {
case _: Exception => _
}
}
})
And in the place where you can say that batch processing is ended
t.interrupt()
If processing is done within 2 hours - waiter thread is interrupted and e-mail is not sent. If processing is not done - e-mail will be sent.

Answer 3

Let me draw your attention towards Streaming Query listeners. These are quite amazing lightweight things that can monitor your streaming query progress.
In an application that has multiple queries, you can figure out which queries are lagging or have stopped due to some exception.
Please find below sample code to understand its implementation. I hope that you can use this and convert this piece to better suit your needs. Thanks!
spark.streams.addListener(new StreamingQueryListener() {
override def onQueryStarted(event: QueryStartedEvent) {
//logger message to show that the query has started
}
override def onQueryProgress(event: QueryProgressEvent) {
synchronized {
if(event.progress.name.equalsIgnoreCase("QueryName"))
{
recordsReadCount = recordsReadCount + event.progress.numInputRows
//Logger messages to show continuous progress
}
}
}
override def onQueryTerminated(event: QueryTerminatedEvent) {
synchronized {
//logger message to show the reason of termination.
}
}
})

Answer 4

I'm using Kubernetes currently with the Google Spark Operator. [1]
Some of my streaming jobs hang while using Spark 2.4.3: few tasks fail, then the current batch job never progresses.
I have set a timeout using a StreamingProgressListener so that a thread signals when no new batch is submitted for a long time. The signal is then forwarded to a Pushover client that sends a notification to an Android device. Then System.exit(1) is called. The Spark Operator will eventually restart the job.
[1] https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/spark-on-k8s-operator

Answer 5

One way is to monitor the output of the spark job that was kick started. Generally, for example,
If it writes to HDFS, monitor the HDFS output directory for last modified file timestamp or file count generated
If it writes to a Database, you could have a query to check the timestamp of the last record inserted into your job output table.
If it writes to Kafka, you could use Kafka GetOffsetShell to get the output topic's current offset.

Answer 6

Utilize
TaskContext
This provides contextual information for a task, and supports adding listeners for task completion/failure (see addTaskCompletionListener).
More detailed information such as the task 'attemptNumber' or 'taskMetrics' is available as well.
This information can be used by your application during runtime to determine if their is a 'hang' (depending on the problem)
More information about what is 'hanging' would be useful in providing a more specific solution.

Answer 7

I had a similar scenario to deal with about a year ago and this is what I did -
As soon as Kafka receive's message, spark streaming job picks up the event and start processing.
Spark streaming job sends an alert email to Support group saying "Event Received and spark transformation STARTED". Start timestamp is stored.
After spark processing/transformations are done - sends an alert email to Support group saying "Spark transformation ENDED Successfully". End timestamp is stored.
Above 2 steps will help support group to track if spark processing success email is not received after it's started and they can investigate by looking at spark UI for job failure or delayed processing (maybe job is hung due to resource unavailability for a long time)
At last - store event id or details in HDFS file along with start and end timestamp. And save this file to the HDFS path where some hive log_table is pointing to. This will be helpful for future reference to how spark code is performing over the period time and can be fine tuned if required.
Hope this is helpful.