Let the bot deal with troublesome communications for us
Have you ever encountered a state of affairs the place your downstream knowledge pipelines are blocked by a small guide mistake in one of many Google Sheets? Typically, the sheet isn’t even owned by your group, so you may’t do something however chase the sheet proprietor to repair it. In the meantime, many different essential pipelines are additionally failing as a consequence, and you must deal with them as nicely.
You are feeling exhausted and drained. The worst half is, there’s nothing you may actually do as an engineer. It’s all about limitless communication and stakeholder administration. The Google Sheet difficulty is simply an instance of supply points that may happen throughout numerous scales. Take a second to pause and take into account one difficulty that resonates with you as we delve into the article.
A key to enhancing this case is automating the communication lifecycle inside your knowledge pipelines. In case your pipeline has an alerting mechanism in place, then it’s already a superb begin. Nevertheless, alerts primarily goal the information engineering groups moderately than exterior groups.
Based mostly on my expertise, it’s equally very important to ascertain proactive communication with the supply group or finish customers to make sure they’re well-informed about ongoing conditions and may take motion accordingly. All through this text, I’ll use Mage for the implementation, a contemporary Airflow different identified for its efficient options in fixing such issues.
Automated communication
One of many missions of engineers is to automate issues. It saves us time for the long run and it’s enjoyable. No one enjoys repeatedly chasing the sourcing group to repair knowledge points or individually explaining what occurred to finish customers when issues are usually not working. We’d as a substitute let a bot do it for us. There are two ranges of automation we will implement:
Rapid suggestions to the information supply group — Reasonably than manually informing the supply group on the information difficulty, an automatic and constant means of communication may be established by a bot. Every time a knowledge take a look at fails, a callback-type like perform can be triggered to inform the supply group by way of e-mail or Slack, offering them with detailed causes for…
