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Prowler’s AWS Provider leverages Boto3’s Standard retry mode to automatically retry client calls to AWS services when encountering errors or exceptions.

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Retry Behavior Overview

Boto3’s Standard retry mode includes the following mechanisms:
  • Maximum Retry Attempts: Default value set to 3, configurable via the --aws-retries-max-attempts 5 argument.
  • Expanded Error Handling: Retries occur for a comprehensive set of errors. 
    # *Transient Errors/Exceptions*
The retrier handles various temporary failures:
RequestTimeout
RequestTimeoutException
PriorRequestNotComplete
ConnectionError
HTTPClientError

# *Service-Side Throttling and Limit Errors*
Retries occur for service-imposed rate limits and resource constraints:
Throttling
ThrottlingException
ThrottledException
RequestThrottledException
TooManyRequestsException
ProvisionedThroughputExceededException
TransactionInProgressException
RequestLimitExceeded
BandwidthLimitExceeded
LimitExceededException
RequestThrottled
SlowDown
EC2ThrottledException
  • Nondescriptive Transient Error Codes: The retrier applies retry logic to standard HTTP status codes signaling transient errors: 500, 502, 503, 504.
  • Exponential Backoff Strategy: Each retry attempt follows exponential backoff with a base factor of 2, ensuring progressive delay between retries. Maximum backoff time: 20 seconds

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Validating Retry Attempts

For testing or modifying Prowler’s behavior, use the following steps to confirm whether requests are being retried or abandoned:
  • Run prowler with --log-level DEBUG and --log-file debuglogs.txt
  • Search for retry attempts using grep -i 'Retry needed' debuglogs.txt
This approach follows the AWS documentation, which states that if a retry is performed, a message starting with “Retry needed” will be prompted. It is possible to determine the total number of calls made using grep -i 'Sending http request' debuglogs.txt | wc -l
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