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Diagnose Bad Data in Pipelines

HardPipelines00:00
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Your question is Diagnose Bad Data in Pipelines. Take a moment with it on the right.

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Problem

Scenario

You're supporting a data pipeline that feeds customer-facing workflows, and a customer reports behavior that looks wrong in the product. Before treating it as an application bug, you want to determine whether the issue comes from incorrect, missing, duplicated, or delayed data moving through the pipeline.

Question

What would you do if you suspected a customer issue was caused by bad data rather than a product bug?

What to Inspect

  • Raw source payloads for the affected customer
  • Ingestion timestamps versus event timestamps
  • Duplicate keys such as external_record_id
  • Schema drift, null spikes, and rejected rows
  • Differences between raw, transformed, and served tables