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Apache Airflow with RunVouch

Airflow is very good at telling you a task failed. A task that succeeds with an empty DataFrame, a DAG that is paused, or a scheduler that stopped scheduling all look like silence.

How it runs on Apache Airflow

Wrap the command of a BashOperator, or use the Python client inside a PythonOperator / @task. One RunVouch agent per DAG (or per critical task) is the usual shape.

Store the key

An Airflow Variable or Connection backed by your secrets backend; pass it into the task environment (env={"RUNVOUCH_KEY": ...}) rather than hardcoding.

Wrap the job

from airflow.decorators import dag, task
from airflow.operators.bash import BashOperator
from airflow.models import Variable
import pendulum, runvouch

@dag(schedule="0 2 * * *", start_date=pendulum.datetime(2026, 1, 1, tz="UTC"), catchup=False)
def nightly_report():
    build = BashOperator(task_id="build",
        env={"RUNVOUCH_KEY": Variable.get("runvouch_key")},
        bash_command="rv run nightly-report --evidence-file /out/report.html -- python /opt/report.py")

    @task
    def summarise():
        with runvouch.vouch("nightly-summary", evidence=lambda: {"rows": n > 0}) as run:
            n = summarise_rows(run)   # run.tool(...) per LLM call for cost and loop detection

    build >> summarise()

nightly_report()

rv fails open: if RunVouch is unreachable the job still runs and you get one warning line.

Register the cadence and caps

rv agent nightly-report --cadence 24h --grace 30m --max-runtime 1h --evidence --cap-run-cost 2

Register the agent once, from anywhere with the key. Cadence is what turns a schedule that stopped into an alert; --evidence makes a run without evidence a failure; the caps pause the agent when it overspends.

What goes silent on Apache Airflow

• A paused DAG (or one that failed to import after a bad deploy) schedules nothing; the DAG import error banner is not an alert. MISSED is.
• sla_miss_callback only fires when the scheduler is healthy enough to notice.
• A task with retries=3 around an LLM call is a retry storm with a budget; the per-run cost cap ends it.

What RunVouch detects

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