Monitor your ingestion¶

In this guide, you'll learn the basics of how to monitor your data source ingestion.

By being aware of your ingestion pipeline and leveraging Tinybird's features, you can monitor for any issues with data flow.

Prerequisites¶

You don't need an active Workspace to follow this guide, just an awareness of the core Tinybird concepts.

Key takeaways¶

1. Understand and visualize your data pipeline
2. Leverage the Tinybird platform and tools
3. Be proactive: Build alerts

Understand your data pipeline and flow¶

The first step to monitoring your ingestion to Tinybird is to understand what you're monitoring at a high level.

As a data team, the most common complaint you'll get from your stakeholders is “the data is outdated” (closely followed by "my dashboard is broken"... but that's another matter). When stakeholders complain about outdated data, you and your data engineers start investigating, putting on the intellectual diving suit and checking the data pipelines upstream until the problem is found.

Understanding how data flows through those pipelines from the origin to the end is essential, and you should always know what your data flow "landscape" looks like.

Use the tools¶

Tinybird provides several tools to help you:

• The Data Flow graph, found in the left-hand nav, is Tinybird’s data lineage diagram. It visualizes how data flows within your project. It shows all the levels of dependencies, so you can see how all your Pipes, Data Sources, and Materialized Views are connected.
• Service Data Sources are logs that allow you to keep track of almost everything happening data-wise within your system.
• Time Series, when used in combination with Service Data Sources, allows you to visualize data ingestion trends and issues over time. Time Series is found just under Data Flow in the left-hand nav.

Build alerts¶

Lastly, you can create a personalized alert system by integrating your Pipes and Endpoints (that point to certain key Service Data Sources) with third-party services.

Example scenario: From spotting birds to spotting errors¶

Overview¶

In this example, a user with a passion for ornithology (the study of birds 🤓) has built a Workspace called bird_spotter (GitHub repository here). They're using it to analyze the number of birds they spot in their garden and when out on hikes. It uses Tinybird’s high frequency ingestion (Events API) and an updated legacy table in BigQuery, so the Data Sources are as follows:

1. bird_records: A dataset containing bird viewings describing the time and bird details, which is populated using the Events API every day:

2. birds_by_hour_and_country_from_copy: An aggregated dataset of the bird views per hour and country, which is populated from a Copy Pipe every hour:

3. tiny_bird_records: A dataset with a list of tiny birds (i.e. hummingbirds), which is replaced every day using Tinybird's BigQuery Connector:

As you can see, the three Data Sources rely on three different methods of ingestion: Appending data using the high frequency API, aggregating and copying, and syncing from BigQuery.

To make sure that each of these processes is happening at the scheduled time, and without errors, this user needs to implement some monitoring.

Monitoring ingestion and spotting errors¶

Remember all those tools Tinybird offers? Here's how this user fits them together:

The Service Data Source called datasource_ops_log can be filtered by Data Source and ingestion method. By building a quick Time Series, they can immediately see the "shape" of their ingestion:

It shows yellow bars (HFI ingestion) and green bars (BigQuery sync) every day, and blue bars (copy operation) every hour. Now, the user can build a robust system for monitoring. Instead of just focusing on the ingestion method, they can create 3 different Pipes that have specific logic, and expose each Pipe as a queryable Endpoint. Each Endpoint will aggregate key information about each ingestion method, and count and flag errors.

Endpoint 1: Check append-hfi operations in bird_records¶

SELECT 
  toDate(timestamp) as date,
  sum(if(result = 'error', 1, 0)) as error_count,
  count() as append_count,
  if(append_count > 0, 1, 0) as append_flag
FROM
  tinybird.datasources_ops_log
WHERE
  datasource_name = 'bird_records'
AND
  event_type = 'append-hfi'
GROUP BY date
ORDER BY date DESC

Endpoint 2: Check copy operations in birds_by_hour_and_country_from_copy¶

SELECT
  toDate(timestamp) as date,
  sum(if(result = 'error', 1, 0)) as error_count,
  count() as copy_count,
  if(copy_count >= 24, 1, 0) as copy_flag
FROM
  tinybird.datasources_ops_log
WHERE 
  datasource_name = 'birds_by_hour_and_country_from_copy'
AND
  event_type = 'copy'
GROUP BY date
ORDER BY date DESC

Endpoint 3: Check replace operations in tiny_bird_records¶

SELECT 
  toDate(timestamp) as date,
  sum(if(result = 'error', 1, 0)) as error_count,
  count() as replace_count,
  if(replace_count > 0, 1, 0) as replace_flag
FROM
  tinybird.datasources_ops_log
WHERE
  datasource_name = 'tiny_bird_records'
AND
  event_type = 'replace'
GROUP BY date
ORDER BY date DESC

Using the output¶

Because these Pipes are exposed as API Endpoints, they can be consumed by any third party application to build real-time alerts. This could be something like DataDog (following this helpful integration guide), Grafana (using this plugin), PagerDuty or Uptime Robot, or GitHub Actions with a cron job system checking for errors.

Example GitHub Actions implementation¶

In the bird_spotter example repo, you can see the scripts and workflows that the user has built:

• ingest.py and monitor.py are Python scripts that run daily. The first ingests data (in this case from a sample csv), and the second checks if the append, copy, and sync operations have happened and are error-free. (Because this guide is an example scenario, there's a function that randomly chooses not to ingest, so there's always an error present!)
• ingest.yml and monitor.yml are yaml files that schedule those daily runs.

The output of a daily check would look something like this:

INFO:__main__:Alert! Ingestion operation missing. Last ingestion date is not today: 2024-04-16
INFO:__main__:Last copy_count count is equal to 9. All fine!
INFO:__main__:Last replace_count count is equal to 1. All fine!
INFO:__main__:Alerts summary:
INFO:__main__:Append error count: 1
INFO:__main__:Copy error count: 0
INFO:__main__:Replace error count: 0

In this instance, the ingestion script has randomly failed to append new data, and an alert is triggered that the user can action. In contrast, copy operations and replace counts have run as expected: 9 copies and 1 BigQuery sync occurred since 00:00.

Next steps¶

• Read the in-depth docs on Tinybird's Service Data Sources
• Learn about the difference between log analytics and log analysis in the blog "Log Analytics: how to identify trends and correlations that Log Analysis tools cannot"