Case study · Manufacturing · Go/Kafka · 4 months

IoT Platform — Data Loss Down 89%

Observability and pipeline resilience improvements for manufacturing telemetry system.

IoT Platform — Data Loss Down 89%

Context

  • Sensor data pipeline losing messages during network hiccups and service restarts.
  • No visibility into processing lag or data quality; manual reconciliation took days.

Actions

  • Added distributed tracing and metrics for pipeline stages (ingestion, transform, storage).
  • Implemented at-least-once delivery with idempotent consumers and dead-letter queues.
  • Created automated data quality checks and alerting on anomalies.

Results

  • Message loss reduced from 3.2% to 0.35% under normal conditions.
  • Processing lag visibility enabled proactive scaling before SLA breaches.
  • Data reconciliation time dropped from 8 hours to 20 minutes.
-89%
Data loss
-96%
Reconciliation time
100%
Pipeline visibility