What do you like best about the product?

1. End-to-end view of data lineage across our whole data lifecycle: Atlan perfectly integrates with large parts of our tool stack (Snowflake, DBT, Tableau, Salesforce, Fivetran), which gives us great transparency into our data flows & structures. Especially being able to identify & export dependencies have been pivotal for our data incident management and requirements analyses for changes in our data structure. In order to paint a full picture of our tool landscape, we would love to see additional integrations being published for rETL tools like Hightouch, data quality tools like Metaplane or additional CRMs like Hubspot & Zendesk.

2. Outstanding support from our CSM & Customer Support team: Our CSM serves as a trusted advisor when it comes to the overall architecture of the tool and general data governance best practices. His level of support & commitment for us to get the most value out of the tool is far above the average SaaS CSM support. For instance, our CSM introduced us to a dedicated internal Data Governance Consultant, who took multiple hours of time to share his experience and advise us on how to effectively implement data governance at our organisation.
Likewise, the Customer Support team exhibit impressive technical understanding & structured problem solving, providing us with very timely and deep analyses of any issues coming up.

3. Great pace of delivery for new features: Atlan regularly publishes highly relevant new product features at a fast pace. Very regularly, if we provide feedback around missing or non-optimal functionalities, it turns out that the respective feature is already on the roadmap and might even be released within the next couple of weeks. It has become very apparent that the product strategy is very much centered around customer feedback & pain points, which we appreciate a lot.

What do you dislike about the product?

1. Workflows/Playbooks: Atlan offers the Playbook functionality to automate metadata population, data owner assignments, tag assignments, etc. While this functionality has proven very useful already, I would love for the automation engine to become more powerful. Top features on our wish list would be event-based triggers, more effective approval processes, metadata propagation across lineage and outbound API call functionalities.

2. Pricing: While the Atlan team has been ensuring that pricing should not be a blocker for our data governance efforts, the list prices for connectors and member licenses are fairly high compared to other SaaS tools and only economical at high discounts.

3. Bugs: While Atlan publishes new features at a very strong pace, there are somewhat regular cases where features do not work as expected and need to be fixed by the engineering team. It's worth calling out that in those cases, the fixes are implemented very quickly as well, though!

4. Permission management: The general permission management based on Personas & Purposes is somewhat too complex compared to other SaaS tools and not very user-friendly. We would love for our users to immediately see all metadata and assets that they have access to rather than having to switch between personas & purposes.

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

Overall, we're very satisfied with Atlan and our collaboration with them. Atlan is a game changer for our data governance & data management efforts, especially for collaboration within our centralised data team.

Atlan enables us to effectively share knowledge both within our data team and with external stakeholders by serving as a source of truth for our most important term & metric definitions. Terms & metrics can be easily & extensively documented in the Glossary including descriptions, in-depth ReadMes, custom metadata and external documentation (e.g. Confluence). It's also very helpful to be able to link these terms to suitable dashboards and tables to indicate where the source of truth for the respective term or metric comes from.

We're also using Atlan for the documentation of our Snowflake tables. While some documentation has already been included in our DBT models directly, this documentation is not easily accessible for stakeholders or downstream consumers of the data (e.g. analysts). Using Atlan, we can democratise this documentation automatically by pulling the respective descriptions from DBT directly and populating them in Atlan. Using Atlans powerful API, we're also working on loading ReadMes from our directory directly, such that documentation for data engineers becomes easy to populate and consumable by stakeholders at the same time.

Atlan is proving to be highly effective to analyse up- & downstream dependencies of tables, data products and dashboards, significantly reducing communication efforts. For instance, exporting downstream dependencies for impact analysis and analysing upstream dependencies for root cause analysis in Atlan have become an integral part of our data incident management process. Being able to quickly identify impacted assets and their owners not only enables fast assessment of the incident impact. It also allows for immediate stakeholder identification, saving valuable time in the incident resolution.

Lastly, we're also currently starting to use the Data Products & Data Domain features in more depth. Atlan allows to extensively document data products (e.g. description, ReadMe, criticality, sensitivity) and relate relevant tables and dashbaords via automated rules. By being able to add both data products and individual tables & dashboards to data domains, the tool is becoming our source of truth for data roles & responsibilities and valuable input for domain-specific reporting on data governance maturity.