I was trying to reason in my mind, I knew that the weapon cannot function without someone triggering it. Only people who could trigger this was by the messages that were coming in from a designated source system. No one outside of this source had the ability to trigger this. My analysis turned out to be true, I could see that there were half a million army of messages marching in and each one of them were aiming and shooting down at the target database. This army was wearing their uniform and they were pouring in like the storm troopers of the source application. But how could this be, I knew there was neither breach in our system, nor in the source system and the numbers were too huge to be true… looking at those numbers I was excited to see that the weapon I wrote was able to function the way we wanted, even in this huge influx of messages. The sad part was it was jeopardizing the database’s life and destroying my own home. This was when I had to call our super hero.
Picture source from: www.hubs.hull.ac.uk
Now enters our super hero, he is the one guy we go to when shit breaks. He is powerful, focused and equipped with lot of data analytics, I quickly blurted out the facts of the problem and told him about the possible entries & exits of this code maze. I added here that there could be no breach in the system.
The super hero hovered over the area and dropped his data sensors all over the place. The first set of data results came in soon, his query gave out that the army of messages were wearing a specific uniform from the source. With this he minimized his scope of problem to only those specific army men. He shot some more spy queries into the direction of the army and soon they returned with data like counts of how many army men were marching at a point of time.
The next set of weapons he used gave him the number of army men that the system was dealing with per day. According to me, the numbers were like at least 10x times more than the normal army which was marching. Our super hero had to run couple more queries and soon he started seeing the patterns that each day the number in the army marching was increasing, Week by week it was steadily increasing.
He took his time machine and entered into the space-time-cause universe and started tracing back into days and into the past to find out exactly when the army started marching, how long they had been marching. The time machine only took him to a month back and there we could see that the army was on a move from over a month now and we never got a hint of their movements. He came back to the present and we still didn’t have answers to when it all started.
He took out his pattern analyzer and fired at the data he had got from his time travel. Soon he could see what we couldn’t see amongst the chaos. He could see that the same group of soldiers came back every day and were detonating the weapon. He could see that on the first week of that month they were attacking four times a day, by mid of the month their attacks increased to 5 times a day and now they are more aggressive and were appearing 6 -7 times every day. This was the kind of an infinite loop which you cannot get out of … it was like the Matrix Revolutions where the number of replicas of the same agent was increasing day by day. The pattern was clear, the cancer was spreading.
Luckily for us, we had migrated to a new database few months back, so the data logs for the previous year was lying in the old database. Since I had the key maker, I got the key to the old database and our super hero entered the door and fired all his data analysis query weapons on the old database. He could see that the daily rate of the army which used to be in few hundreds or thousands whole of last year, was now suddenly 200x to 400x times.
It was as though the data was speaking to our super hero. The sensors, monitors and queries he fired and with access to the old and new data, he triggered his merge weapon on the data. After merge he used the plotting gadget to plot them on a graph. Soon the pictures started to fit in, he throwed his numbers and dates around the plotter, his data analytic suite of gadgets drew a trace of the actual growth rate of the message army. The graph he plotted out showed it clearly, finally, we could all see, the point of influx, the point where and when exactly it all started… It started during November, just couple of weeks before the holiday season.
He asked, who was in the system during that time? What changed on that date? And I knew, there was a change that was done to the code function. But it was unrelated to this, I stopped reasoning in my head and we quickly opened up the code and analyzed and finally we tracked it… There it was, the Agent Mr. Smith laughing at me… It had been the cause of this cancer and from that day it had been multiplying and replicating itself in the matrix. If it was not for our super hero and his data analytics tool we wouldn’’t have figured this out…
There was something I learnt.
Every Number speaks, each data has a story to tell, we only need someone who can listen and understand.
DataOps …is the need of the hour.
