Monitoring, the UI, and the CLI – Fundamentals Study Guide
This domain accounts for roughly 15% of the exam and covers operating Airflow day to day: using the web UI to observe DAGs and diagnose failures, and the CLI to trigger, test, and inspect. The exam expects familiarity with the main UI views, how to re-run tasks, and a few common CLI commands.
The Airflow UI Views
| View | Shows |
|---|---|
| Grid | DAG runs (columns) and task instances (rows) over time, color-coded by state — the fastest way to spot failures across runs |
| Graph | The DAG's tasks and dependency edges as a graph, with each task's state for a selected run |
| Calendar | DAG run history by date (heatmap-like overview of when it ran and outcomes) |
| Logs | Per-task-instance stdout/stderr and tracebacks |
Task state colors tell the story at a glance — a failed task ran and errored (open its logs), while queued, running, success, skipped, and up_for_retry each have distinct colors.
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