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Diagnose Source vs Pipeline Issues

MediumPipelines00:00
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Your question is Diagnose Source vs Pipeline Issues. Take a moment with it on the right.

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Problem

Scenario

You are supporting a customer-facing data pipeline and need to determine why the data in the destination looks wrong. The issue could come from the source system, or it could be introduced during ingestion, transformation, or loading.

Question

How would you investigate whether a customer's data issue is caused by bad source data or a platform problem?

What to Inspect

  • Source extract payloads and timestamps
  • Raw landing data before transformation
  • Transformation logic and schema mappings
  • Load history, retries, and duplicate handling
  • Row-count and checksum reconciliation by run

Goal

Key distinction·Bad source data versus platform-introduced corruptionExpected outcome·A repeatable investigation path with evidencePrimary objective·Isolate the first stage where data diverges