Fluentd and Openlineage
Why are Fluentd and Openlineage a perfect match?
Fluentd support is experimental and could be changed or removed in a future release.
Modern data collectors (Fluentd, Logstash, Vector, etc.) can be extremely useful when designing
production-grade architectures for processing Openlineage events.
They can be used for features such as:
- A server-proxy in front of the Openlineage backend (like Marquez) to handle load spikes and buffer incoming events when the backend is down (e.g., due to a maintenance window).
- The ability to copy the event to multiple backends such as HTTP, Kafka or cloud object storage. Data collectors implement that out-of-the-box.
They have great potential except for a single missing feature: the ability to parse and validate OpenLineage events at the point of HTTP input.
This is important as one would like to get a Bad Request
response immediately when sending invalid OpenLineage events to an endpoint.
Fortunately, this missing feature can be implemented as a plugin.
We decided to implement an OpenLineage parser plugin for Fluentd because:
- Fluentd has a small footprint in terms of resource utilization and does not require that JVM be installed,
- Fluentd plugins can be installed from local files (no need to register in a plugin repository).
As a side effect, the Fluentd integration can be also used as a OpenLineage HTTP validation backend for
development purposes.
Fluentd features
Some interesting Fluentd features are available according to the official documentation:
The official Fluentd documentation does not mention guarantees about event ordering. However, retrieving
Openlineage events and buffering in file/memory should be considered a millisecond-long operation,
while any HTTP backend cannot guarantee ordering in such a case. On the other hand, by default
the amount of threads to flush the buffer is set to 1 and configurable (flush_thread_count).
Quickstart with Docker
Please refer to the Dockerfile
and fluent.conf
to see how to build and install the plugin with
the example usage scenario provided in docker-compose.yml
. To run the example setup, go to the docker
directory and execute the following command:
docker-compose up
After all the containers have started, send some HTTP requests:
curl -X POST \
-d '{"test":"test"}' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
http://localhost:9880/api/v1/lineage
In response, you should see the following message:
Openlineage validation failed: path "/": "run" is a required property, path "/": "job" is a required property, path "/": "eventTime" is a required property, path "/": "producer" is a required property, path "/": "schemaURL" is a required property
Next, send some valid requests:
curl -X POST \
-d "$(cat test-start.json)" \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
http://localhost:9880/api/v1/lineage
curl -X POST \
-d "$(cat test-complete.json)" \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
http://localhost:9880/api/v1/lineage
After that you should see entities in Marquez (http://localhost:3000/) in the my-namespace
namespace.
To clean up, run
docker-compose down
Deployment on Kubernetes
Section under construction
Parser plugin
Openlineage-parser is a Fluentd plugin that verifies if a JSON matches the OpenLineage schema.
Configuration
Although Openlineage event is specified according to Json-Schema, its real-life validation may
vary and backends like Marquez may have less strict approach to validating certain types of facets.
For example, Marquez allows a non-valid DataQualityMetricsInputDatasetFacet
.
To give more flexibility, fluentd parser allows following configuration parameters:
validate_input_dataset_facets => true/false
validate_output_dataset_facets => true/false
validate_dataset_facets => true/false
validate_run_facets => true/false
validate_job_facets => true/false
By default, only validate_run_facets
and validate_job_facets
are set to true
/
Development
To build dependencies:
bundle install
bundle
To run the tests:
bundle exec rake test
Installation
The easiest way to install the plugin is to install external packages:
rusty_json_schema
installs a JSON validation library for Rust,fluent-plugin-out-http
allows non-bulk HTTP out requests (sending each OpenLineage event in a separate request).
fluent-gem install rusty_json_schema
fluent-gem install fluent-plugin-out-http
Once the external dependencies are installed, a single Ruby code file parser_openlineage.rb
needs
to be copied into the Fluentd plugins directory (installing custom plugin).
Fluentd proxy setup
Monitoring with Prometheus
The information above, provided you with valuable information on how to use this plugin (Yes, this is a plugin, you will still need the main Fluentd application to run it!), you may also want to check how Fluentd application itself is doing using Prometheus and for that, you may want to add the plugin: fluent-plugin-prometheus at https://github.com/fluent/fluent-plugin-prometheus and include the following setup in your prometheus.yml file:
global:
scrape_interval: 10s
scrape_configs:
- job_name: 'fluentd'
static_configs:
- targets: ['localhost:24231']
You may also want to include the following additional parameters to your fluent.conf file:
#### source
<source>
@type forward
bind 0.0.0.0
port 24224
</source>
#### count the number of incoming records per tag
<filter company.*>
@type prometheus
<metric>
name fluentd_input_status_num_records_total
type counter
desc The total number of incoming records
<labels>
tag ${tag}
hostname ${hostname}
</labels>
</metric>
</filter>
#### count the number of outgoing records per tag
<match company.*>
@type copy
<store>
@type forward
<server>
name myserver1
host 192.168.1.3
port 24224
weight 60
</server>
</store>
<store>
@type prometheus
<metric>
name fluentd_output_status_num_records_total
type counter
desc The total number of outgoing records
<labels>
tag ${tag}
hostname ${hostname}
</labels>
</metric>
</store>
</match>
#### expose metrics in prometheus format
<source>
@type prometheus
bind 0.0.0.0
port 24231
metrics_path /metrics
</source>
<source>
@type prometheus_output_monitor
interval 10
<labels>
hostname ${hostname}
</labels>
</source>
For any additional information, you can check out Fluentd official documentation on https://docs.fluentd.org/monitoring-fluentd/monitoring-prometheus#example-prometheus-queries# fluentd-openlineage-parser