Data engineering·Orchestration and running it in anger
the dashboard renders perfectly and every number on it is from Thursday.
Data freshness
Also calledfreshness, staleness, data age
How old the data behind an output is, measured from the source event rather than from the last successful run. It is the metric that catches the failure mode nothing else catches: a pipeline that succeeds while producing nothing. Measuring it at the point of consumption rather than at the pipeline is what makes it honest, because every intermediate success is compatible with a stale answer.