The Real Cost of Silent Data Pipeline Failures

A loud failure - a crash, an error email, an alert firing at 3am - is a recoverable problem. You know something broke, you know when it broke, and you can investigate. A silent failure is different. The pipeline runs. No errors are logged. No alerts fire. The data is wrong, or incomplete, or stale, and nobody knows until someone notices that the numbers don't add up. At that point, the first question is "how long has this been happening?" and the answer is almost always longer than you expected.