Poison message blocks shard
An events-ingestion consumer reading from an ordered partition (Kinesis shard) stops making progress at 11:40. Dashboards: `IteratorAge` for one shard climbs linearly to 45 minutes while the other shards are healthy; the consumer logs a tight loop of the same `JsonParseException: Unexpected character ('\x00')` every few hundred ms; CPU on that worker is at 100%; no records are being checkpointed for that shard. A new upstream producer SDK version rolled out an hour ago. How do you triage, unblock the pipeline, and avoid losing the records behind the bad one?
What a strong answer looks like
Stop the bleeding first (mitigate), then form hypotheses from real signals. Separate root cause from symptom, communicate status as you go, and close with what prevents a repeat.
0:00 of about 30 min
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.
Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.