'yarn application -list' doesnt show any results

Question

I have run some Spark applications on a YARN cluster. The application shows up in the "All applications" page in the YARN UI http://host:8088/cluster but the yarn application -list command doesnt give any results. What could be the cause of this ?

Answer 1

When you use "-list" option without "-appTypes" or "-appStates" options, it applies default filtering for "application-types" and "states" (check the highlighted section below). If none of your applications match the default filtering, then you will not get any result.

Total number of applications (application-types: [] and states: [SUBMITTED, ACCEPTED, RUNNING]):0

If you see the help for "-list", it states the following:

"List applications. Supports optional use of -appTypes to filter applications based on application type, and -appStates to filter applications based on application state".

This seems to be bit misleading.

If you don't specify "-appStates", by default it takes states as "SUBMITTED", "ACCEPTED" and "RUNNING", for filtering. Please check the code below from "listApplications()" method of "org.apache.hadoop.yarn.client.cli.ApplicationCLI.java".

private void listApplications()
{
    ............

    if (allAppStates) {
      for (YarnApplicationState appState : YarnApplicationState.values()) {
        appStates.add(appState);
      }
    } else {
      if (appStates.isEmpty()) {
        appStates.add(YarnApplicationState.RUNNING);
        appStates.add(YarnApplicationState.ACCEPTED);
        appStates.add(YarnApplicationState.SUBMITTED);
      }
    }

    ............
}

As per the code above, following logic is applied:

1. Call "yarn application -list": Shows all applications in states "SUBMITTED", "ACCEPTED" and "RUNNING" For e.g. for me output is below (there are zero applications in default states)

CMD> yarn application -list

Total number of applications (application-types: [] and states: [SUBMITTED, ACCEPTED, RUNNING]):0

2. Call "yarn application -list -appStates ALL": Shows all the applications (in any state) For e.g. for me output is below (there are totally 268 applications, also check the filtering criteria applied to "states"):

CMD> yarn application -list -appStates ALL

ALL Total number of applications (application-types: [] and states: [NEW, NEW_SAVING , SUBMITTED, ACCEPTED, RUNNING, FINISHED, FAILED, KILLED]):268

3. Call "yarn application -list -appStates FINISHED": Shows all the applications (in FINISHED state) For e.g. for me output is below (there are 136 applications in FINISHED state):

CMD> yarn application -list -appStates FINISHED

Total number of applications (application-types: [] and states: [FINISHED]):136

Answer 2

It turns out that I had enabled Log aggregation in YARN but had set the yarn.nodemanager.remote-app-log-dir to a custom hdfs directory (/tmp/yarnlogs), So logs were actually getting aggregated at /tmp/yarnlogs in HDFS, but the yarn command was still searching for logs at the default location on HDFS (/tmp/logs). So changing the property to its default value fixed it for me.

NOTE: If the log aggregation directory is misconfigured ,it also causes an a error while trying to access job history from the web UI, that looks like :
Log aggregation has not completed or is not enabled