Product Update: September

Published on September 30, 2022

TL;DR

Private lists
Enterprise DataOps Hub
Open Source: Meltano 2.0 upgrade
Instant Insights: Auth0 subscription cost management
Bugs squashed

Welcome to the September product update where, once again, if you think that moving data doesn’t mean emailing a spreadsheet, this is the email for you.

This month’s features are all about making things easier. The good news is, with our flexibility / open source approach, we set up a workspace how most people like to work, but always have customisable features you can add.

Read on for the full update:

Private Lists

Data must work the way that you need it to. Our intention is to bring you technology that is tangible and easy to use. Here we have built a feature that lets you collect the data that you need and group it into lists.

Private Lists act as a collection of the data you need at that moment. This could be:

Cross department statistics
Data centered around a keyword (“Black Friday”), Month or Country
Automated data required for a specific project
Data from third parties for metrics like KPIs

In short, data you don’t want to see all the time, but you do want to be able to find quickly in one place.

We borrowed the idea from social media to make the workspace look and feel more intuitive. Our thinking is that a business news feed, and now Private Lists, will tell you when you need to take action.

In a nutshell: the information finds you.

By listing datasets together, you can also easily share with colleagues and customers without having to email links or static attachments. Secure, so your governance department is going to love it.

Speaking of Data Governance…

Enterprise DataOps Hub

This feature is for more established data teams who are looking for reliable plugins. The more confidence in the data, the more you get out of it so we are working hard to raise the quality bar and save you time with compliance.

This is the big Data Governance dilemma: are you hesitant to share information that could reduce costs, inform risks and maximise output? Is this because of concerns for integrity, consistency and misuse?

Using DataOps plugins ensures that your data stack is consistent in its quality and function. So if you already have some form of data stack, we can now standardise it. This means all teams get updates to the latest database connectors, models, reports, utilities to get their data pipeline work done.

We look after the infrastructure, you concentrate on best practice.

Meltano 2.0 upgrade

Behind the scenes we have been updating the platform to Meltano 2.0 this month. If you have heard of Singer, dbt, Airflow and Great Expectations, you will know that there remains a tech knowledge requirement that is still out of reach to small and medium sized companies. For SMEs, outsourcing tech projects was the only option.

Until now (you know the drill).

As Meltano technology partners, our mission beyond this is to make anyone who can use a spreadsheet up their game to a workspace.

But as we host these products, we need to make sure they are the latest version, which means we do all the maintenance for you. It also means we can regularly review components and are never committed to a product when a better one is out there. If you have your own team of data engineers they can also do this with no restrictions.

Read more out the Meltano 2.0 benefits https://meltano.com/blog/meet-meltano-2-0/

Auth0 Subscription Cost Management

We are making our workspace work hard for our own business too. For example,

Last month, Auth0 automatically upgraded our account because we went over our Machine to Machine authorisation use (the number of automated access requests we grant users of secured workspaces)

We are absolutely not complaining about paying more for more customers. In fact, we price our own product on data use and not the number of users to avoid barriers to access. But this does mean a cost increase that we had not planned for.

We have a workspace set up with a list of our running cost data. We have an alert that tells us when we are getting close to a price increase from usage. Our alert comes into our newsfeed 20 times faster than the email that is generated and sent to us.

As an emerging business, we don’t want any surprise invoices. Now we can adjust as we grow.

Daily Machine to Machine Usage