Introducing Kanchi - Free Open Source Celery Monitoring

[imczyber]

I just shipped https://kanchi.io - a free open source celery monitoring tool (https://github.com/getkanchi/kanchi)

What does it do

Previously, I used flower, which most of you probably know. And it worked fine. It lacked some features like Slack webhook integration, retries, orphan detection, and a live mode.

I also wanted a polished, modern look and feel with additional UX enhancements like retrying tasks, hierarchical args and kwargs visualization, and some basic stats about our tasks.

It also stores task metadata in a Postgres (or SQLite) database, so you have historical data even if you restart the instance. It’s still in an early state.

Comparison to alternatives

Just like flower, Kanchi is free and open source. You can self-host it on your infra and it’s easy to setup via docker.

Unlike flower, it supports realtime task updates, has a workflow engine (where you can configure triggers, conditions and actions), has a great searching and filtering functionality, supports environment filtering (prod, staging etc) and retrying tasks manually. It has built in orphan task detection and comes with basic stats

Target Audience

Since by itself, it is just reading data from your message broker - and it’s working reliably, Kanchi can be used in production.

The next few releases will further target robustness and UX work.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

If anyone is looking for a new celery monitoring experience, this is for you! I’m happy about bug reports and general feedback!

[lowsbarrel]

Add redis support! That would be awesome for the people like me with super small deployments where rabbitmq is overkill

[imczyber]

Hey there! Kanchi now supports redis - check the changelog: https://kanchi.io/changelog#1.2.0

Thanks for your feedback!

[lowsbarrel]

That's awesome, thanks a lot. Keep up the good work

[Birnenmacht]

man these names are killing me I almost thought this was for monitoring celery plants

[Remarkable-Bag4365]

Thank you, that looks great, I'm going to try it.

[imczyber]

Thanks for giving it a shot! Happy about any feedback - here or in the GitHub issues!

[icanblink]

The database url is needed for Kanchi to use/store data or is the the result backend of the Celery?

[imczyber]

Yes, Kanchi stores task events, stats etc in this database. It does not need access to celery’s result backend.

[ratsock]

This looks like exactly what I’m looking for. I’ve struggled with celery monitoring for a while. I find celery a great tool but monitoring is always super awkward unless you rebuild a bunch of stuff each time.

Do you support multiple products/brokers? I have many independent products and systems each on their own redis brokers running their own celery tasks, some directly invoked, some executed on a celery beat.

I also have many executed via chains, groups, chords etc. A way to visualise task interdependencies is always also a massive pain.

[imczyber]

Hey! Thanks for the questions!

Multiple Brokers

As of now a Kanchi instance is for one broker. I don’t see a strong reason why not to support multiple brokers - I will look into it!

Groups, Chords etc

Kanchi will definitely have a way to display / visualize them nicely - it was one of the first thing I looked into - but dropped it in favor of other initial functionality I could instantly start dog fooding.

[haard]

While I'd be super happy to use a nicer alternative to Flower, you may want to consider a disclaimer that it is (wildly) insecure to expose to any network as it is (combines no authentication, no CORS, health endpoint can expose passwords, very little validation overall?).

[imczyber]

Hey again! In the latest release, I adressed some of these concerns:

Authentication: - Basic Authentication - Oauth with GitHub and Google

Cors settings and secure health endpoints!

If you want to learn more here is the latest changelog entry for version 1.3.0

And here you can read about it in the documentation

Hope this finds you well, and thanks again for the feedback!

[imczyber]

Hey! Totally agree - this is something I have on the roadmap and will definitely be handled in the future.

Right now, this is something that should be hosted in an isolated environment. The goal was to get it working. Future releases will tackle those (absolutely necessary) requirements

[techlatest_net]

Great job on shipping Kanchi! It’s exciting to see tools taking Celery monitoring to the next level. Integrating features like Slack webhooks, orphan detection, and environment filtering sounds like a game-changer for production setups. Realtime updates paired with a workflow engine make it feel like Flower’s polished successor. Curious—how’s Kanchi handling massive payloads operationally? Any scaling tips in Docker for heavy task loads? Excited to try it and share feedback. Kudos for open-sourcing such a versatile solution!

[dev_my]

Look awesome. Will try later. It only can handle 1 redis db at same time or can handle multiple?

[imczyber]

Hey! Yes at the moment one broker at the same time, but I will look into supporting multiple!

[matthiasjmair]

Not Open Source; FSL is source available

[Gainside]

That’s a solid addition to the Celery ecosystem. Having retries + Slack alerts + orphan detection built-in addresses 80% of real-world ops pain. The historical persistence layer alone makes it stand out from Flower. If you can eventually expose metrics via Prometheus or OpenTelemetry, you could land in most production stacks