Situation: Today our daily dashboards are due by 9:00 AM but a key data source is delayed, so the dashboards will be late.
Communication (first 10–15 minutes):
- Notify stakeholders proactively via the usual channel (email/Slack + brief subject line): state the problem, expected impact, ETA if known, and immediate mitigation plan. Example: “Data feed X delayed; summary KPIs may be incomplete. Working on fixes—next update in 30 minutes.”
- Escalate to the data engineering owner and my manager if SLA breach is likely.
Triage (30 minutes):
- Confirm scope: which widgets/metrics depend on the delayed source.
- Check data pipeline logs (ingestion times, errors) and run quick SQL queries to see if partial data exists.
- Reproduce the issue locally or in dev to identify whether delay is upstream (source provider), ETL (job failure/queue), or transformation (schema change).
Prioritization & Actions:
Short-term mitigations (aim to meet SLA or reduce impact)
- If partial data available: publish dashboards with clearly marked “partial data” annotations and show last complete snapshot for missing metrics.
- If metrics can be approximated: surface leading indicators or last-known values with confidence notes.
- Provide a one-page summary with the most critical KPIs via email/Slack to decision-makers while full dashboards finish.
- If fix requires simple restart or re-run, coordinate immediate job rerun with engineering.
Long-term fixes (prevent recurrence)
- Add alerting/monitoring on ingestion latency and downstream dashboard freshness with runbook.
- Implement graceful degradation in dashboards: show cached snapshots and visible freshness/timestamp.
- Collaborate with data engineering to add retries, backfills, and SLAs for upstream providers; document dependencies.
- Schedule a post-incident review to capture root cause, timeline, and action owners.
Result / Follow-up:
- Send a post-mortem with timeline, root cause, actions taken, stakeholder impact, and owner-assigned long-term fixes. Commit to a timeline for each remediation and track progress in our team board.
This approach keeps stakeholders informed, minimizes business disruption with practical short-term alternatives, and reduces future risk through monitoring and process improvements.
