Maintenance

Created: May 24, 2021, Updated: June 26, 2023

From time to time, some steps are needed to be taken to take care of your Bizzflow instance and keep it clean.

Services#

Services are docker containers running in your Airflow VM.

Monitoring#

In certain situations, your data may become unavailable for reasons other than incorrect SQL queries. It is, therefore, important to pay attention to your virtual machines and the services running on them. To address these concerns, we strongly recommend implementing monitoring for your cloud infrastructure. This way, you can receive timely notifications when, for example, your machines are running low on CPU power, indicating the need for scaling up or potentially optimizing your project design.

At Bizztreat, we prioritize setting up monitoring for our clients' installations as part of our managed license package. If you would like to learn more about our services, please feel free to contact us at info@bizztreat.com.

List of services#

Restart services#

When the Airflow UI is not responding, scheduler is not queuing tasks correctly or your consoles seem to be quirky, your best bet is restarting the service that is misbehaving.

1. SSH into the Airflow machine#

Login using SSH key from the installation artifacts. The user name is always bizzflow.

2. Restart required services#

docker-compose -p bizzflow restart

Restart deployment#

If restarting specific service(s) doesn’t help, you may try deploying all services again.

1. SSH into the Airflow machine#

See above.

2. Destroy current deployment#

docker-compose -p bizzflow down

3. Run deployment again#

docker-compose -p bizzflow --env-file project.env up -d flow-ui airflow-webserver

If your git repository containing Bizzflow project is not publicly accessible, you need to tell Bizzflow to use an SSH key to authenticate with your git host. This is done using GIT_SSH_KEY environmental variable. In most cases, the command above will look like this:

GIT_SSH_KEY=`cat id_git` docker-compose -p bizzflow --env-file project.env up -d flow-ui airflow-webserver

Get service’s logs#

Sometimes you need to know what is going wrong. In that case, your best bet is to look at the service’s logs.

1. SSH into the Airflow machine#

See above.

2. Attach to logs live#

docker logs <service-name>_1

For service names see above - list of services.

Press Ctrl+C (or Cmd+C on Mac) to exit the logs.

Disk cleanup#

Sometimes you will run out of space on your Airflow VM. Following are some places you may look to clean up some space.

Logs Cleanup#

Airflow generates lots of logs. All of them are stored and not all of them are needed to kept.

1. SSH into the Airflow machine#

See above.

2. Cleanup the logs#

year=`date +'%Y'`
cmonth=`date +'%m'`
let lmonth=$cmonth-1
rm -rf ~/airflow/logs/scheduler/{2020..$year}-{01..`printf "%02d" $lmonth`}*

This will delete all logs since January 2020 until last month.

If you do not understand the curly braces, see here for more information.

Bizzflow update#

Ensuring the regular updates of Bizzflow is crucial as we continuously enhance its functionality and address any bugs. You can find details about the available versions in the release notes. Bizzflow is designed as a multi-container Docker application. Therefore, updating Bizzflow involves updating all the associated containers. The process outlined below describes how to update a Bizzflow installation based on the provided documentation. Note that if you have a custom deployment, the steps may vary. We recommend using Docker Compose for running Bizzflow. You can locate the docker-compose.yaml file in the home directory of your Bizzflow server. Alternatively, you may check the Bizzflow Git repository for any newer versions. To simplify the update process, we utilize environment variables defined in the compose file. Thus, updating the .env file is all that’s needed. Please follow the step-by-step guide below for detailed instructions.

Step by step guide#

To update the Bizzflow application you would follow these steps:

1. Access the server or environment where the Bizzflow application is running.

2. Locate the .env file within the Bizzflow application directory.

3. Open the .env file using a text editor or a command-line text editor such as Nano or Vim.

4. Look for the variables related to the Docker images (BIZZFLOW_IMAGE, FLOW_UI_BACKEND_IMAGE, FLOW_UI_FRONTEND_IMAGE).

5. Update the values of these variables with the proper version or tag of the Docker images you want to use for the update. Ensure that you provide the correct version information to match the desired Docker images.

6. Save the changes to the .env file.

7. Use the following command to restart the application and apply the changes:

   GIT_SSH_KEY=`cat id_git` docker-compose -p bizzflow up --remove-orphans -d airflow-webserver flow-ui
   

   This command will stop and restart the containers defined in your docker-compose.yml file, using the updated configuration from the .env file.

8. Allow some time for the application to restart and for the changes to take effect. You can monitor the application logs for any errors or unexpected behavior during the restart process.