Troubleshoot the Airflow OpenLineage Configuration

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

No Lineage Appears After a Successful Run

  • Validate environment variables on workers/scheduler (URL, namespace, token).

  • Check the Airflow logs for the OpenLineage provider errors or HTTP 4xx/5xx to Alation.

  • Ensure the operator you used is supported and emits both inputs and outputs.

  • Confirm network egress to the Alation domain on TCP 443.

  • Ensure that the Alation endpoint is accessible from the Airflow hosted environment.

401/403 Authentication Errors

  • Rotate the API token in Alation and update the corresponding variable in Airflow.

Multiple Airflow Instances

Can I connect multiple Apache Airflow instances to a single Alation instance?

  • Yes. Use distinct namespaces for each Airflow deployment to segregate events.

Network Permission Error

ERROR - Failed to emit OpenLineage eventHTTPSConnectionPool(host=’<instance>.alationcloud.com’, port=443):Max retries exceeded with url: “open_lineage_event/

This error may result from the firewalls or VPC on which your Apache Airflow instance is hosted. Contact your network team to update the network permissions. This will allow your Airflow instance to make API calls to the URL mentioned in the error message.

Ensure that your Airflow instance can reach the Alation instance over HTTPS (TCP 443).

Unsupported OpenLineage Version

ERROR - Minimum supported version is 1.2.0, you are using 1.1

The preflight check DAG will fail if you’re using any OpenLineage version older than 1.2.0. Install the latest version of the openlineage-airflow library (1.8.0 or higher).

Debugging Tips

If issues persist, Alation recommends enabling debug logging for OpenLineage by setting the environment variables OPENLINEAGE_CLIENT_LOGGING=DEBUG, AIRFLOW__CORE__LOGGING_LEVEL, and AIRFLOW__LOGGING__LOGGING_LEVEL. After enabling, rerun your DAGs and share the resulting debug logs with Alation Support for further troubleshooting.