April 2026
Intermediate
208 pages
5h 47m
English
Content preview from Growth Engineering
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CHAPTER 3Data Pipelines
You just launched a high-visibility feature meant to improve retention. As the lead engineer, you’re in charge of the post-launch debrief. It’s your job to walk stakeholders through the data and show how the feature performed.
You open the dashboards.
They’re blank.
No events. No charts. No usage insights.
After some digging, you realize the ingestion job that collects telemetry and sends it to your dashboards has failed. Worse, there was no alerting in place to let you know.
The launch happened, but the data didn’t follow.
This chapter is about that data pipeline—how telemetry moves through systems, what can go wrong, and how to design pipelines that are reliable, observable, and ready to support growth.
What Is a Data Pipeline and Why Does It Matter?
When you think about a pipeline, what comes to mind?
You may think of a long tunnel or tube that carries water or oil. If you’re a hardware engineer, you might think of the five-stage processor pipeline: fetch, decode, execute, load, and store. If you work in a laundromat, you might imagine the dry-cleaning process: collect clothes, wash, dry, iron, and fold.
Whatever comes to mind, you’re not wrong. Each of these is a step-by-step system that moves something from one stage to another.
That’s exactly what a data pipeline is.
In this context, a data pipeline is a set of systems through which telemetry flows. Telemetry includes the logs, metrics, and events generated by your application. A pipeline starts ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.