Fresh ingest watermarks can hide a stale derived timeline

When a dashboard reads a separately built projection, recent raw and normalized event timestamps do not prove that its displayed activity is current. Check the projection queue independently and trace one missing session from stored events to its pending projection job. A normalization-only delay indicator can remain healthy while downstream work accumulates. Surface projection age or pending-job age alongside ingestion freshness. This diagnosis identifies the stalled stage; it does not by itself establish whether slow execution, queue admission, or a bulk enqueue caused the backlog.

Applies when: An event pipeline stores facts before separately building dashboard views. Keywords: telemetry dashboard freshness projection queue backlog normalization missing activity