Streaming systems make delay visible. A bad batch job can finish late and still look ordinary. A streaming pipeline leaves a trail: lag, throughput, retries, throttles, checkpoint behavior, and unhappy downstream consumers.
The first question is where pressure enters the system. Producers may be too fast, partitions may be uneven, consumers may be underprovisioned, or a downstream dependency may be turning normal traffic into retries.
A good streaming architecture makes pressure legible. It gives operators enough signals to know whether to shard, slow down, scale out, shed load, or fix the dependency that is quietly setting the whole line on fire.