Member-only story
We Lost 3,000 Signups in One Day
Kafka Never Told Us Why
Do you trust your real-time data?
We did — until it failed silently, and no one knew.
It started on a Monday. The growth team was watching live dashboards. Numbers looked fine.
But something felt off.
That day, traffic was up 20%. Ad spend was up 30%. Signups? Flatlined.
We dug into Kafka. The events were there. Clicks, visits, conversions. Everything looked clean.
But 3,000 users came and left — and never signed up.
And Kafka didn’t throw a single error.
Kafka Wasn’t the Problem. Our Visibility Was.
Kafka is excellent at delivering events. But what happens between events?
That’s where data gets lost.
We had one stream for clicks. Another for signups.
No errors. No alerts. Just… silence.
Here’s the trap:
Kafka doesn’t know if something should have happened — it only knows what did.
If your system fails silently, you need something smarter than just producing and consuming events.
