DE Root Cause Analysis

When to Use

Load this skill when the user needs to:

• Triage a failing or stuck data pipeline (Airflow DAG, Spark job, dbt run)
• Investigate a data quality incident — wrong numbers, missing rows, duplicates, nulls
• Analyze an SLA breach — pipeline ran but finished too late
• Respond to a production incident — unexpected data anomaly reported by stakeholders
• Trace blast radius — which downstream tables/dashboards/jobs are affected by a bad upstream table
• Write an RCA document or post-mortem after resolving an incident
• Build investigation checklists and runbooks for on-call engineers

1. Failure Taxonomy

Correctly classifying the failure type determines the fastest investigation path. Misclassifying (e.g., treating a logic bug as an infrastructure problem) wastes hours.