---
title: "Data Mesh at Grab (Part III): Operationalizing data reliability with automated DPIs"
description: "Grab’s data mesh uses the Signals Marketplace to publish, discover, and reuse trusted data products, while certification establishes ownership, documentation, lineage, and quality controls but does not prevent runtime failures. Data Production Issues (DPIs) turn data-quality signals into an operational workflow that begins when Kinabalu detects unhealthy contract tests and closes when the underlying condition recovers. Triage promotes meaningful contract breaches, deduplicates repeated signals, groups related issues, and records affected assets, intervals, contracts, tests, and dependencies. For diagnosis, the Data Health API exposes a portable taxonomy of UPSTREAM_ERROR, PLATFORM_ERROR, JOB_ERROR, and DATA_ERROR, allowing ownership to follow the likely root cause while platforms retain detailed internal diagnostics. Combined with Hugo’s diagnosis and remediation patterns, the approach is presented as reducing resolution time and feeding operational reliability back into certification."
---

# Data Mesh at Grab (Part III): Operationalizing data reliability with automated DPIs

[Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab) · Harvey Li · Aug 28, 2026

**Type:** Problem & solution

## Summary

Grab’s data mesh uses the Signals Marketplace to publish, discover, and reuse trusted data products, while certification establishes ownership, documentation, lineage, and quality controls but does not prevent runtime failures. Data Production Issues (DPIs) turn data-quality signals into an operational workflow that begins when Kinabalu detects unhealthy contract tests and closes when the underlying condition recovers. Triage promotes meaningful contract breaches, deduplicates repeated signals, groups related issues, and records affected assets, intervals, contracts, tests, and dependencies. For diagnosis, the Data Health API exposes a portable taxonomy of UPSTREAM\_ERROR, PLATFORM\_ERROR, JOB\_ERROR, and DATA\_ERROR, allowing ownership to follow the likely root cause while platforms retain detailed internal diagnostics. Combined with Hugo’s diagnosis and remediation patterns, the approach is presented as reducing resolution time and feeding operational reliability back into certification.

## Context

Certification gives consumers confidence in a data product’s ownership, documentation, lineage, and quality controls, but certified tables, metrics, and streams can still fail at runtime through late arrivals, broken dependencies, or violated freshness expectations. Grab therefore needs a consistent way to detect failures, diagnose root causes, assign responsibility, fix issues, and verify recovery without overwhelming responders with noisy alerts.

## Approach / What changed

Kinabalu evaluates contract tests through Health APIs, promotes meaningful breaches into DPIs, deduplicates and groups related issues, gathers dependency context, and tracks recovery. The Data Health API provides a stable cross-platform error taxonomy so ownership can follow upstream, platform, job, or data failures, while each platform retains its detailed diagnostics. Hugo supplies an example of layered diagnosis and automated remediation within an ingestion platform.

## Takeaways

- A contract test’s overall health can remain unhealthy after individual runs pass; for example, a failed historical partition may need to be backfilled and verified before recovery is complete.
- Kinabalu can link a downstream DPI to an active upstream DPI and inherit its owner, keeping related failures with the team best positioned to resolve the root cause.
- The Data Health API separates portable orchestration needs from platform-specific diagnostics, allowing heterogeneous platforms to evolve their internal error catalogs and tools independently.

**Tags:** [Data Pipelines](https://yomu.fyi/topic/data-pipelines), [Incident Response](https://yomu.fyi/topic/incident-response), [Monitoring](https://yomu.fyi/topic/monitoring), [Observability](https://yomu.fyi/topic/observability), [Reliability](https://yomu.fyi/topic/reliability)

- Source: [Grab](https://engineering.grab.com/data-mesh-at-grab-part-three)
- Source URL: https://engineering.grab.com/data-mesh-at-grab-part-three
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-08-28T12:00:56.197Z

[Read original post](https://engineering.grab.com/data-mesh-at-grab-part-three)