Stream processing is a data handling technique where data is processed continuously as it is produced, rather than stored first and processed later. In hardware telemetry applications, stream processing enables rules, anomaly detection, and data shaping to run on incoming sensor data in real time as it flows from a vehicle or test rig into a storage and analysis system.
Sift's ingestion pipeline applies stream processing to hardware telemetry: rules evaluate incoming data the moment it arrives, enabling engineers to catch off-nominal behavior during a test rather than discovering it in post-flight review.