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Data engineering Streaming BI Alerts

Turning raw operational events into decisions — in seconds.

Business data was scattered across apps, CRMs, spreadsheets and third-party tools. Reports were stale by the time they reached leadership. We built a real-time data platform — ingestion, warehouse, transformations, live BI and threshold alerts — so the business could stop reacting and start noticing.

Live
Ingestion & dashboards
1
Source of truth
Auto
Threshold alerts
Role-based
Views & access
The Problem

Data was everywhere. Insight was nowhere.

The symptoms were classic — the kind every scaling business hits:

  • Data lived in silos: the app database, the CRM, spreadsheets, third-party dashboards, payment gateway, ad platforms.
  • Reports were manually assembled once a week by an analyst juggling exports. Stale by the time anyone read them.
  • No one was alerted when a metric broke — you learned about issues from a customer complaint or a Monday morning slide.
  • Leadership, ops and category teams all needed different views — but nobody was building them.
  • Definitions of the same metric ("active user", "GMV", "cancelled") disagreed across teams.
The Solution

A real-time data platform, engineered to be trusted.

Streaming ingestion from every source, a lightweight warehouse with versioned transformations, live dashboards per role, and a threshold-alert engine that pings the right person on the right channel.

📥

Streaming ingestion

Real-time capture from apps, CRMs, payment gateways, ad platforms and 3rd-party integrations.

🏢

Lightweight warehouse

Columnar store optimised for analytical queries — cost-efficient, scales with the business.

🧮

Transformation pipelines

Versioned SQL/dbt-style transformations — one definition per metric, tested and documented.

📊

Live BI dashboards

Role-based dashboards for founders, ops, category managers — refreshed continuously, not weekly.

🚨

Threshold alert engine

Alerts on metric breaches routed to the right person on the right channel — with cool-downs to avoid noise.

📚

Metric catalogue

Every metric has one canonical definition, an owner and a description. No more "which GMV do you mean?"

🔐

Access & governance

Role-based access to dashboards and raw datasets — PII masking where needed.

🧪

Data quality checks

Row-count, freshness, null-ratio, schema-drift checks — with alerts when pipelines silently break.

Architecture

Deployed architecture

Sources → streaming ingest → warehouse → transformations → BI & alerts. Each layer swappable, all events auditable.

Sources Product DB (CDC) App / server events CRM · payments Ads · marketing Spreadsheets / 3rd-party Ingest Streaming pipeline Kafka-style bus Connectors CDC · SDKs · APIs · SFTP Airbyte / Fivetran-style Schema registry Contracts · drift detection Buffering Retries · dead-letter · replay Idempotent writes Exactly-once effect Data quality checks Freshness · rows · nulls Warehouse Columnar warehouse BigQuery / Snowflake / ClickHouse (chosen per case) Raw · staging · marts layers Versioned + tested SQL Metric catalogue Transformations dbt-style models CI-tested Materialised views Sub-second dashboards Scheduled + on-event Consumption BI dashboards Live · role-based Founders · Ops · Category Metabase / Looker / Superset Alert engine Thresholds · anomalies Slack / WhatsApp / SMS / Email Owner-based routing Reverse-ETL / API Push metrics back to CRM, product, marketing tools Governance Role-based access · PII masking · audit log · metric catalogue with owners & definitions Cloud data stack · CI/CD for pipelines & models · monitoring on freshness, cost and query SLA · nightly backups
Source
Ingest / Pipeline
Warehouse / Transform
BI / Alerts / Governance
Reverse-ETL / API
Tech stack

Technologies used

Stack is chosen per client — the pattern is consistent, the components are pragmatic.

Ingestion

Kafka / Redpanda Airbyte / Fivetran-style connectors CDC (Debezium) Custom event SDKs Schema registry

Warehouse & transformation

BigQuery / Snowflake / ClickHouse dbt-style models CI-tested SQL Metric catalogue

BI & alerts

Metabase / Looker / Superset Custom alert engine Slack · WhatsApp · SMS · Email Owner-based routing

Orchestration & governance

Airflow / Dagster Data quality checks Role-based access PII masking Audit log

Cloud & ops

Cloud data stack (AWS / GCP) CI/CD for pipelines & models Freshness / cost / query-SLA monitoring Nightly backups
Screens shipped

Screens from the platform

bi.pulseplatform.io/leadership Leadership · live Updated 4s ago · streaming REVENUE TODAY₹ 18.4L▲ 12% vs yesterday ACTIVE CUSTOMERS2,841Live sessions DELIVERY SLA96.2%Target 95% OPEN ALERTS21 critical Revenue · live, minute-by-minute 00:00now Top SKUs · live Sunflower Oil 15L Wheat Flour 25kg Sugar 50kg ⚠ SLA breach · North zoneDelivery delays > 15 min · 3 orders
Web · Leadership dashboard
Live revenue, active customers, SLA and top SKUs — updated in seconds, not overnight.
bi.pulseplatform.io/ops Ops dashboard · live queues 3 queues · 2 breaches · auto-refresh QUEUEDEPTHSLA TIMEROWNERSTATUS Order confirmationNorth zone 24 03:41 over SLA Ops · Priya Breach Delivery dispatchSouth zone 12 01:12 remaining Ops · Suresh At risk Payment reconciliationAll zones 6 04:20 remaining Finance · Ashok On track ⚠ Breach detail · Order confirmation, North zone 24 orders unconfirmed > 15 min · likely cause: warehouse staff shortage 2–4 PM shift Escalate to manager Reassign queue
Web · Ops dashboard
Queue depth, SLA timers, and one-click escalation — with root-cause context, not just a red flag.
bi.pulseplatform.io/catalogue/delivery_sla Metric · delivery_sla_pct ● Fresh · 2m DEFINITION % of orders delivered within promised window, rolled up hourly per delivery zone. OWNER Ops Analytics team · Priya S. REFRESH Every 60s · streaming USED IN Leadership dashboard, Ops dashboard, weekly board deck LINEAGE delivery_events stg_deliveries fct_sla_hourly delivery_sla_pct 30-day trend
Web · Metric catalogue
Definition, owner, freshness and full lineage — so leadership trusts the number.
bi.pulseplatform.io/alerts Alert rules · 14 active + New rule METRICCONDITIONSEVERITYCHANNELCOOL-DOWNOWNER delivery_sla_pct < 90% for 10 min Critical Slack + SMS 15 min Priya order_queue_depth Anomaly · 3σ spike Warning Slack 30 min Suresh payment_failure_rate > 2% for 5 min Critical Slack + Call 10 min Ashok + 11 more rules New rule · draft IF home_care_backlog exceeds 4 shifts notify via WhatsApp Severity Warning Cool-down 30 min Owner Ops lead Save & activate
Web · Alert rules
Threshold or anomaly detection, severity, channel, cool-down and clear ownership per rule.
Adoption

Rolled out role-by-role

  • Founder dashboards first — high trust, small blast radius if a metric was wrong.
  • Ops dashboards next — with the ops leads as co-owners of every metric definition.
  • Category / functional dashboards after — once the platform's freshness and correctness were trusted.
  • Alerts started conservative to avoid noise; thresholds were tuned once teams learned to trust them.
  • A monthly "metric review" replaced the weekly reconciliation debates.
Impact

Impact on the business

Live
Instead of weekly
Proactive
Alerts before complaints
1
Metric definition
Trusted
By founders & teams alike

Leadership stopped asking "what happened last week?" and started asking "what's happening right now?" — and the ops team started fixing problems before customers noticed. The debate shifted from "which number is correct?" to "what are we going to do about it?"

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