The Alation Data Intelligence Platform

Negative

My main use case for Alation Data Catalog  is that we have been working on a cyber data lake program that deals with a lot of data governance and cataloging, which includes cybersecurity data, patient scan data, PDX data, as well as lots of data from the regulatory board.

Regarding how I am leveraging Alation Data Catalog , there are many scopes that we are now exploring where the catalog can be expanded with other use cases, which deal with the financial aspects of healthcare that can be implemented in customer engagements as well as vendor engagements that we have on a day-to-day basis. By utilizing AI in this robust space, cataloging all this information in this AI era helps a lot because the data is enormous, and as a medtech company, we need to ensure that none of the data we maintain is brought outside of the catalog and is maintained robustly.

A specific example of how Alation Data Catalog helps with cybersecurity or patient scan data is that we have been able to establish a lot of data lineages, including how the data gets changed over the period of time. When it comes to regulatory compliance, it helps a lot in terms of the cataloging, balancing this data such as PII and HIPAA compliance-related information, and it is not just about the catalog; it is about how we maintain the data from an accessibility point of view, who is responsible for managing this kind of data, and it prevents data loss. From a cybersecurity perspective, using the catalog, we have been able to implement rule-based DLPs and DLP  policies.

The best features Alation Data Catalog offers include how it provides labels, understands which data catalog or areas we have dealt with related to lineage, finding relations, and discovering usable data. It ensures that the data catalog is primarily built on core principles such as stewardship, quality, and master data management. I really appreciate the way Alation provides support in maintaining our features.

The stewardship and master data management features specifically help my team by linking KPIs to business outcomes and continuously tracking performance. We are able to set up a business glossary with business names, definitions, descriptions, ownerships, and related undocumented insights of contextual knowledge. This includes medical transcription points of view and customer test analysis, allowing us to automate repetitive workflows and identify manual workflows to automate using the data catalog. From an audit perspective, we also do business adoptions, maturity and culture assessments using surveys and collaborative techniques.

We are able to build controls by designing procedures and policies that define how people and systems will use the data, especially for data moving internally and externally. One crucial element from a data management point of view is controlling vendor access, given that we engage many vendors. Using principles of least privilege for vendor access should be our first case. Once these controls are established, we create systems that audit and test their effectiveness. We are also using five components of the data governance model, providing clear notices regarding data governance policies, forming a data governance panel, establishing controls, and setting up a data inventory for performance and due diligence.

Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization by helping us establish data governance and privacy. For functional strategies, we identify data systems and individuals that need to be included in our security strategy using the catalog. It improves the protection of systems that hold our data, detecting attacks at earlier stages in the life cycle and responding to those attacks in ways that support both data security and governance systems. We have improved data quality and accuracy, made informed decisions faster while reducing risks, and ensured compliance by enabling security and efficient access. Importantly, we establish a single source of truth, centralizing metadata and standardizing definitions, which minimizes confusion and helps with consistent data use across the organization.

We have seen a lot of ROIs in areas such as improved data access features enabled through the catalog, ensuring that the data end users and downstream applications access does not have breaches. Now that we have established clear governance policies, assigning the right access to the right users helps teams work independently while reducing reliance on subject matter experts. From a risk and compliance perspective, adhering to HIPAA, PCI, and PCI DSS standards helps protect sensitive data from misuse or breaches.

Alation Data Catalog can be improved by treating areas that could incorporate best practices or improvements, such as identifying data domains, which refer to logical data groups customers, vendors, and other entities. Another area for improvement is determining the most important elements of data and deciding between adopting a centralized or decentralized operating model. These decisions could come in advisory forms sent by the system, helping establish metrics for measuring our success. Additionally, bringing in AI capabilities to automate tracking and labeling can optimize how we handle data information levels.

Regarding improvements, establishing success metrics such as concrete numerical benchmarks for our data governance policy would be helpful goals. For example, measuring the average time it takes someone to access the data needed for their job would be an important feature to improve.

I have been using Alation Data Catalog for more than six years.

Alation Data Catalog is absolutely stable.

The scalability of Alation Data Catalog is remarkable; as data sizes grow, we can also scale categorizations, calibrations, and the types of data we ingest and catalog through this tool, which has been a strong asset for us.

Customer support for Alation Data Catalog has been great; we have defined several SLAs that have resolved critical issues and incidents with excellent support.

Positive

Before using Alation Data Catalog, we had several on-premise legacy systems, which we phased out over the last four to five years in favor of Alation Data Catalog.

We have seen a return on investment, having saved close to 10.5% of our costs, with expected ROI growing yearly by about 17%. We saved over 1,000 man-hours in a single year, which was crucial.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Alation Data Catalog is positive; discussions with the vendor partners provided a detailed breakdown of costs and how they can be reduced over time, which was a great experience.

Before choosing Alation Data Catalog, we evaluated numerous options that went through a rigorous selection process.

My advice for others looking into using Alation Data Catalog is to start using this tool if you want to manage cataloging, data governance, compliance, and risk-based metrics. It has been an amazing asset for us in managing complex use cases related to data management. I believe we had a good discussion, and I have provided a lot of information. I would say keep updating features, continuously adding more AI, and help us on that journey. I would rate this product and experience a nine out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services  (AWS )

What do you like best about the product?

Alation's strongest feature is its ability to automatically map and visualize the full journey of data from source to report, including transformations at the column level, often via Query Log Ingestion. I like this the most.

What do you dislike about the product?

Complexity and Investment Required: The platform's powerful features come with a high degree of initial configuration and ongoing administrative overhead.

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

Reduced Development & Debugging Time: When a source system changes, Alation's column-level lineage shows exactly which downstream reports, dashboards, or other data pipelines will be impacted. This eliminates the need for manual, time-consuming, or waiting for a downstream user to complain before realizing something broke.

What do you like best about the product?

What I like most about Alation is that it reduces the amount of time I spend searching for data. Before using it, I often had to rely on multiple people or old documentation to figure out where something lived. Now I can usually find the table, definition or owner through a quick search.

What do you dislike about the product?

The main issue I run into with Alation is that some parts of the interface can feel slow especially when navigating between sections or loading larger assets. It’s not unusable but there are moments where it takes longer than I’d expect for a tool that’s meant to speed up data work.

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

Alation has helped reduce the amount of time I spend trying to figure out where data comes from and who is responsible for it. Before using it a lot of my work involved asking around or checking multiple systems just to confirm simple details. Now most of that information is in one place.

My main use case for Alation Data Catalog  is data discoverability and metadata management.

In my day-to-day work, I use Alation Data Catalog  for data discoverability and metadata management by ingesting metadata from a number of different data platforms, including Snowflake  and Power BI. We use the lineage features to keep track of where the data is moving within our environment. We also maintain certain items related to our data assets, including sensitivity tags and data descriptions, which makes it easier for our self-service analytics users to find the data they need.

The best features that Alation Data Catalog offers are its search capabilities and the fact that it works with many different data platforms; it is essentially platform agnostic. The other piece that I really think is important is how easy it is to use as well as to manage.

What makes the search capabilities of Alation Data Catalog stand out for me is the fact that every item within the catalog is indexed and searchable, as well as the filtering features that allow you to narrow down to just the types of assets that you need. Wildcard searches are also very helpful. It is a very intuitive tool, as long as you are using the filters.

Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization by allowing users to answer questions that they had without trying to track down an expert. This has saved them quite a bit of time and frustration. It has allowed them to solve problems they probably would not have been able to solve had they not had the catalog.

We have been measuring the curation of content within the catalog that has gone up over time, and we have also seen the number of users in the catalog increase, as well as the amount of activity within the catalog increase. We were seeing about an average of about 20% increase month over month for the last few months.

Alation Data Catalog can be improved by enhancing their lineage capabilities to make it easier for us as users to search the lineage without having to use the Alation Data Catalog user interface. If they could put it in a relational format, then we could join that information with other metadata from other platforms. We could join it in reporting. Lineage improvement would be the biggest thing.

I have been using Alation Data Catalog for eight years.

I choose a nine for my rating because it has been extremely easy to use and extremely easy to set up. It allows us to automate our curation. It allows us to integrate with metadata from other platforms, such as Power BI and Snowflake . It gives us a much better overall view of our data environment. The search capabilities are extremely useful. It is easy for a user to come in and find what they need without having to learn a very complicated tool.

My advice to others looking into using Alation Data Catalog is to give a very close look at the capabilities and make sure that they suit what your organization needs. If you are looking for better data discoverability, Alation Data Catalog is basically your best choice. Consider which connectors that you want to purchase, since those are licensed separately. Make  sure that you purchase only what you need as far as that goes. Consider trying to integrate Alation Data Catalog information with other platforms as well to allow you to improve upon reporting. That worked successfully for us. I give Alation Data Catalog a rating of nine.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services  (AWS )