Monitoring Workflow Progress with Tower

An added feature which makes Nextflow particularly attractive is the ability to monitor workflow progress over the internet. This service is called Tower, and if you set up an account then you will be able to log in and view the progress of any workflows which you have started using your private Tower token.

NOTE: If you are concerned with the privacy of any of the metadata associated with your workflow, do not use Tower. While no actual file data is transmitted, the file names will be contained in the associated logs and this external resources has not undergone any security review.

Getting Started

After setting up an account at https://tower.nf/, follow their instructions to copy your private access token. That access token can be added to your Nextflow configuration file, regardless of whether you are running jobs on gizmo or AWS.

If you would rather use Tower for one individual workflow (and not add it to your global configuration), the access token can be provided using the -with-tower option in the run script.

Monitoring Workflows

Once you’ve started a workflow, just open up Tower and select your workflow from the list. The progress of each individual job, as well as the overall workflow, will be displayed alongside any additional execution metadata which Nextflow can collect (e.g. estimating the cost of workflows in AWS).