what does PendingTasks metrics in SWF signify?

Question

AWS documentation is not descriptive enough for figuring out the significance of PendingTasks metrics. refer : https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonswf/latest/developerguide/cw-metrics.html

I wanted to know if these metrics are worth alarming or monitoring ?

Answer 1

When you schedule a SWF workflow, it automatically creates a task list for you. Or you can select an already existing task list to place the worklfow in.

You can see the task lists on your SWF dashboard:

PendingTasks creates a metric for each task list from each workflow domain and displays how many tasks are pending after each minute.

Now, if this metric worth alarming, that can be decided by you depending on your use case. If the number of pending tasks is getting bigger, probably means something got stack or it takes longer than expected. It might worth alarming in that case.