Data Processing Delays - Time Series Data affected

Incident Report for MODE

Postmortem

Summary

During the time window between 2:19 and 2:31 JST, our internal time-series database (TSDB) experienced issues that impacted a portion of metrics data. As a result:

• BizStack Console and Assistant failed to display metric data from the most recent 24 hours.
• Threshold-based alerts intermittently did not trigger as expected.
• Heartbeat (liveness) alerts produced false positives.

These issues were intermittent and did not affect all customers or all metrics.

Root Cause

The incident was triggered during maintenance work to add a new read replica to the MongoDB cluster backing our TSDB.

• A read replica was mistakenly created from a 1-month-old snapshot, rather than the latest snapshot used in standard operations.
• Because the snapshot was outdated, the new replica required additional time (about 10 minutes) to catch up with recent data.
• Some TSDB queries were routed to this replica before it had fully synchronized, causing queries to return incomplete or stale data.

Under normal procedures, replicas are created from up-to-date snapshots, allowing near-immediate synchronization. This operational error introduced unexpected replication lag.

Why a Replica Was Being Added

MODE regularly adds and rotates replica nodes in production as part of routine maintenance and resilience readiness. The issue occurred during this standard procedure.

Resolution

After synchronization completed, metrics and alerting behavior returned to normal.

Preventive Measures

We are implementing the following improvements to prevent recurrence:

  1. Strengthen operational procedures to ensure the correct snapshot is always selected when creating replica nodes.
  2. Enable MongoDB’s built-in mechanism to block queries on newly added replicas until they have fully synchronized.
  3. Update our maintenance runbook to explicitly require validation of replica readiness before allowing production traffic.

We apologize for any disruptions caused and appreciate your understanding as we continue to improve the reliability of MODE’s monitoring infrastructure.

Posted Nov 19, 2025 - 20:18 PST

Resolved

During the time window between 2:19 and 2:31 JST, our internal time-series database (TSDB) experienced issues that impacted a portion of metrics data. As a result:

• BizStack Console and Assistant failed to display metric data from the most recent 24 hours.
• Threshold-based alerts intermittently did not trigger as expected.
• Heartbeat (liveness) alerts produced false positives.

These issues were intermittent and did not affect all customers or all metrics.
Posted Nov 18, 2025 - 09:00 PST