Connecting your stack without breaking it
Integrations fail quietly. A checklist for wiring up sources so the numbers stay trustworthy months after setup.
Quiet failures are the expensive ones
A broken integration rarely throws an error in your face. It just stops sending rows, and the chart flattens in a way that looks like a slow week.
Instrument the pipeline itself
Track row counts and last-sync timestamps per source and alert on silence, not only on errors. Absence of data is data.
Name things once
Agree on a shared definition of an active user, a qualified lead, and a closed deal before mapping fields. Renaming later means reprocessing history and relitigating every past decision.
Version your definitions
When a definition changes, keep the old one alongside it for a full reporting cycle so trends stay comparable and nobody argues about a step change that was really a redefinition.
Test with a boring week
Validate a new source against a week nothing happened. If the numbers disagree when the business was quiet, they will disagree far worse under load.
