The Alation Data Intelligence Platform

What do you like best about the product?

Data cataloguing and connection available for multiple source system

What do you dislike about the product?

Lineage is not as great and UI for the same is lacking

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We have made Alation as 1 stop shop for data exploration and finding what data is available and where it is available, so that our users know where to go and get access for the same

What do you like best about the product?

Business users can easily adapt and learn

What do you dislike about the product?

A lot of features missing, especially Data Quality.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Helps better engagement of Data Governance Community

What do you like best about the product?

I love how easy Alation is to navigate, making it straightforward to find the information I need swiftly and efficiently. Its built-in Composer and Analytics tools are invaluable, offering robust support for complex tasks. I truly appreciate how Alation links assets together, enhancing the cohesiveness of our documentation efforts. When documenting a project, Alation enables seamless connections between primary documents and other relevant documentation hubs, including data extraction or ingestion requests. As a result, referencing and navigating through different project documents becomes highly intuitive and organized. Additionally, having a one-stop view area for projects allows me to gain insight into a project's high-level details and access all related documents via convenient links. The simplicity with which I can navigate project documents enhances productivity and reduces time spent searching for interconnected assets. Switching from Collibra to Alation has been a positive shift as Alation's user interface is notably less complex and more user-friendly, eliminating excess clicks that were previously required. The ease of Alation's initial setup was remarkable once I understood the essential elements like templates and document hubs, streamlining our transition and integration process.

What do you dislike about the product?

There are two minor aspects of Alation that I find could be improved. Firstly, when an asset is hidden by an admin, it would be beneficial to have a visual indicator in the sidebar to easily identify that the asset is hidden. Secondly, a feature allowing users to log in as a different user to see that user's view of Alation would be extremely useful.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use Alation to facilitate data governance by acting as a data catalog and documentation hub, linking assets seamlessly to streamline project navigation and ensure easy access to related documents.

What do you like best about the product?

For my team, Alation is more than just a SaaS tool; it represents a partnership that extends our governance capabilities beyond the boundaries of our organization. We have been using Alation for several months, though we are still participating in the Right Start program. The interface offers flexibility, allowing us to tailor the experience for end users through data products and domain pages, as well as enhance catalog elements with rich text and image formatting. Alation fulfills its promise by efficiently scanning our data landscape, which helps keep our compute overhead costs low.

While the tool itself is top-tier, I would be remiss not to acknowledge the Alation team. From sales to onboarding and ongoing support, Alation invests in the relationship and genuinely listens to client concerns. Their team is a valued partner to our governance program.

What do you dislike about the product?

To be determined. The only complaint I can offer is the limited number of data products offered with non-enterprise licenses.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Alation supports our developing governance program by serving as a central hub for data enrichment, ownership, and discoverability. With Alation, our organization gains greater visibility into the data we produce thus improving both discoverability and trust in our data. Consolidating our organizational knowledge in one place is especially significant for a company like ours, where turnover is low and many employees have been here for over twenty years. As a relatively new hire who is also unfamiliar with the industry, I have personally encountered the challenges that come from undocumented decisions about data, logic, and integrations. If implemented effectively, Alation has the potential to help us advance more quickly and operate with greater efficiency.

I have been using Alation Data Catalog  for the past year now.

My main use case for Alation Data Catalog  is updating data descriptions and making sure analysts have what they need to do their job.

We mainly use Snowflake  and DBT to update descriptions and documentation that then gets automatically pulled into Alation Data Catalog for analysts to use.

I really appreciate the lineage functionality that Alation Data Catalog offers.

The lineage functionality helps me in my work by allowing analysts to know how downstream tables are being built and views, and it can also be connected to Power BI, which is impressive.

Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization by allowing analysts to be onboarded much quicker and easier as a lot of their questions are answered within Alation Data Catalog. This lowers the burden of other analysts within the business having to teach and answer queries that would already be answered within Alation Data Catalog.

Some of the downsides about the lineage is that some of the code is quite difficult to read as the formatting is a bit ugly sometimes.

Alation Data Catalog can be improved with the lineage formatting, which is a little bit hard to read sometimes, and there are things like data flow objects where the naming conventions are a bit odd. I believe the catalog sets could be improved since currently, we have a lot of catalog sets just to apply stewards to different schemas, columns, and tables.

From my experience, Alation Data Catalog is stable.

Alation Data Catalog's scalability is really good since everything is cloud and everything gets pulled into the system via Snowflake  and DBT automatically.

So far, customer support from Alation is good; we have been able to contact them, and they have been able to help us whenever we have had issues, as well as made some improvements from our feedback.

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

I was not personally involved in the setup of the pricing for Alation Data Catalog, but I do know that we were awarded or given a lot of free viewer licenses, which helped a lot.

I have not seen a return on investment, and I have not measured those things yet since we have not had it long enough; it still takes quite a bit of time to update and sell the product to the business.

I was not part of the discussions before choosing Alation Data Catalog, and I do not think there were other options; Alation was the only option.

My advice to others looking into using Alation Data Catalog is to sort their metadata out in Snowflake and their source system first before developing any connections to Alation.

My company does not have a business relationship with Alation other than being a customer.

I gave Alation Data Catalog a review rating of 9.

Private Cloud

Amazon Web Services  (AWS )