If you’re a data engineer managing pipelines at scale, you’ve likely run into this: a job fails, and you’re left sifting through endless logs to figure out what went wrong. It’s time-consuming, repetitive, and often requires tribal knowledge to resolve. With so many possible things to observe, it’s also easy to get overwhelmed.
That’s why we built the Issue Detection Engine, powered by an AI Agent and now part of watsonx.data integration. It’s a huge step toward Agentic DataOps: a new way of working where AI takes on repetitive diagnostic tasks, so your team can focus on building, improving, and scaling pipelines.
What It Does
Issue Detection Engine: Data Observability - IBM Mediacenter
The Issue Detection Engine automatically analyzes jobs and classifies detected issues into categories such as:
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Schema issues
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Data Quality issues
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Access issues
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Infrastructure issues
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SQL issues
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Invalid Reference issues
For each issue, the AI Agent provides:
Built-in agentic AI provides faster, more comprehensive and more accurate root cause identification and impact analysis, so you can obtain complete knowledge of the issue in seconds.
Why It Matters
For Data Engineers
Cut MTTD and MTTR. Stop spending 50% of your time on pipeline maintenance. The Issue Detection Engine surfaces the critical items that truly need your attention, letting you repurpose time toward higher-value engineering work.
For Developers
Detect and understand pipeline failures before they impact production. Validate issues early in the lifecycle and save time during testing and release.
For Managers
See the patterns of issues your teams are running into. Instead of firefighting case by case, you can identify weak spots across pipelines and establish new best practices.
Helping You Focus on What’s Worth Observing
Not every failure is worth an alert. But when an issue recurs or impacts multiple assets, you want to make sure it’s visible, tracked, and escalated. With Issue Detection Engine, you can escalate it into an alert with one click and track when and where it reappears.
This makes collaboration easier across teams and ensures the most important problems don’t fall through the cracks.
Just the Beginning of Agentic DataOps
Issue Detection is the first capability in our Agentic journey. The same AI Agent that today detects and explains issues will evolve into:
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Automated remediation suggestions.
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Self-healing workflows that fix issues on their own.
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Smarter insights about your data stack.
The vision: a hands-on assistant embedded in your observability layer, helping you detect, understand, and resolve issues so your team can focus on delivering business value, not firefighting.
Avaliable now on watsonx.data integration
The issue detection engine within data observability capabilities of IBM watsonx.data integration marks a turning point: AI-driven observability that doesn’t just watch, it acts. For developers, data engineers, and managers alike, it transforms how issues are detected, diagnosed, and resolved, cutting down wasted time and elevating the quality of data powering AI and business decisions.
Book a demo today and see how the issue detection engine can transform your team’s productivity and data reliability.