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Hernan Chilabert
Hernan Chilabert

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Why Your Celery Dashboard is Lying to You (and How I’m Using AI to Fix It)

#python #sre #celery #backend

We've all been there. The Datadog dashboard is a sea of green. Redis is connected. Workers are "Online." Yet, the support tickets are flooding in: "Why haven't I received my password reset email?"

I realized that standard monitoring has a massive blind spot. It monitors infrastructure status, not business health.

The Problem: The "Silent Killers" In high-scale environments, your system doesn't always "crash." It degrades silently.

  • Ghost Workers: Processes that are alive in Docker but disconnected from the Celery control plane.

  • Task Vanishing: Tasks that drop out of Redis without a single log entry.

  • The Latency Illusion: A short queue that hides a task stuck for 45 minutes because of a misconfigured visibility timeout.

The Solution

An Audit CLI with a "Brain" I decided to build a tool that automates the manual troubleshooting I used to do via SSH. But listing metrics wasn't enough. I wanted a report that a Senior Dev could act on in seconds.

I integrated Claude to act as a "Virtual SRE." Instead of just showing you a configuration value, the CLI interprets the data.

The "WOW" Report: Check out this output from a recent test:

Celery Report

Your visibility_timeout is 30 minutes. I found 3 tasks that regularly exceed 45 minutes.

💀 Impact if uncaught: These tasks WILL execute twice. Both will complete → duplicate execution.

🎯 Business Impact: If process_bulk_import duplicates, you'll have duplicate inventory entries. If generate_monthly_report duplicates, you'll email customers twice.

⚡ Fix (add to celeryconfig.py): broker_transport_options = {'visibility_timeout': 7200} # 2 hours

Why AI?

Logs are for machines; reports are for humans. By using LLMs to cross-reference task history with infrastructure settings, the CLI doesn't just find bugs; it finds business risks. It explains the why, the so what, and the how to fix it.

What's Next?

I'm currently stress-testing this on production environments. If you're tired of "green dashboards" that hide real problems, I'd love for you to join the beta.

Which are your 'silent killers'? How did you fix them?

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