In my role focused on data governance, Atlan is crucial for cataloging and managing assets from various sources like SAP into our company's data lake.
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Atlan is a game changer & pioneer in modern Data Governance space
Has a user-friendly interface and a straightforward setup process
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
Atlan has significantly streamlined our data governance processes by centralizing asset management and improving metadata handling. However, the absence of scheduled email reports has been a minor inconvenience, as it would enhance our workflow efficiency.
What is most valuable?
The feature I find most valuable in Atlan is its exceptionally user-friendly interface. Unlike other more technical data catalogs I've used, it has an intuitive design that facilitates easy adoption among business users.
Features like assigning data owners and managing metadata are also pivotal for our data governance practices.What needs improvement?
The product could be improved by offering scheduled email reports for managed assets. This feature would greatly benefit users like me who need regular updates without having to log into the platform daily.
For future releases, enhancing reporting functionalities, particularly the ability to schedule and receive email reports, would be valuable.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using Atlan for about five months now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The product is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Although I haven't been directly involved in large-scale user deployments, the platform is scalable. Adding users has been manageable and aligns well with our current needs.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support services are good.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup process was straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
The support from Atlan's vendor team has been excellent in assisting with any setup queries.
What other advice do I have?
Using Atlan for day-to-day operations has been straightforward. I would recommend it for its user-friendly interface and robust data governance capabilities.
I rate it a nine.
Exceptional Data Cataloging Tool for Metadata Management
The Chrome extension and metadata discovery within preferred tools are highly valued features.
Lineage tracking between data platforms and drill-down to column-level lineage aids in investigations.
The tailored implementation blueprint helped us focus on the right tasks.
Atlan's wide range of supported integrations and ease of integration are commendable.
Lineage across tools and the chrome extension has made it very helpful and easy for teams to adapt to the tool.
Easy to use
Atlan - AI based metadata management for datalakes
Best in Class Data Catalog
We are still rolling out all the features, but so far we have seen a lot of value, specially using the lineage functionality.
It is saving us a lot of time when we need to do an impact analysis e.g. what assets will be impacted downstream from making this change in our warehouse.
It is helping us streamline how we manage our data assets and making it the central place for all things data. Data consumers can submit tickets on a dashboard that has a bug or if they have an idea. It is a repository of all our knowledge around specific assets.
Best-in-class Active Metadata Management Tool
2. The customer support and customer solutions teams at Atlan are highly engaged in helping clients achieve their goals. They often create custom packages or solutions to meet specific needs.
3. Atlan’s Chrome extension is noteworthy. It offers the convenience of an embedded Atlan solution within Databricks, Power BI, Google Chrome, and other platforms, eliminating the need to switch between applications. This seamless integration enhances user experience and productivity.
With Atlan’s workflow features, metadata and lineage curation have become possible. The tool also allows for the massive import of Business Metadata with custom packages and automation (playbooks).
Reporting analytics is another key feature of Atlan. It generates insights from tool usage, providing valuable data such as the number of weekly active users, the number of curated assets, assets with lineage, popularity, and more. This information can be instrumental in understanding user engagement and improving the overall user experience.
Atlan: A New Cornerstone In Our Data Management Journey
New Data Governance Strategy Easily Implemented with Great Platform
2.) Easy to use and intuitive UI, the browser extension is icing on the cake, end users can view information in Atlan without having to switch from their current screen to the platform, which is going to aid immensely in adoption. We've had users already solve issues using Atlan with little to no training.
3.) Customization features from personas and policies, to customizable messaging and scorecards to ensure integrity and accuracy the first time.
2.) Atlan only goes to the tile level in Looker, it would be nice if they went all the way to the calculation for lineage and specificity without having to manually define it.
3.) The UI has basic spelling and grammar errors that could be cleaned up.
- Implement standard communication processes.
- Mapping data from source to destination for root cause and impact analysis
- Permission and access governance
- Standardization across the tech stack
- Scorecards on metadata reporting to ensure maximum business ROI
Offers numerous out-of-the-box connectors, user-friendly interface and easy to manage
What is our primary use case?
Its core offering is a data catalog. However, it goes beyond that. We are building a hub of knowledge, encompassing business and data knowledge across the entire company.
The idea is that any employees or new hires needing onboarding can use it to understand the data they'll be working with, the data sources in the company, and the business knowledge of their field.
What is most valuable?
Atlan has many branches and features. Perhaps the most valuable one is the abundance of out-of-the-box connectors. As soon as you get access to the product, you can start using their connectors, which are easy to use and connect across a wide variety of data sources. This eliminates the need for lengthy development efforts to create new integrations.
They also offer automated lineage embedded in the connectors, allowing us to track where the data is coming from and where it's going. We find it very efficient in cataloging data sources.
Additionally, the user-friendly interface is a big plus, making it easy for users to familiarize themselves with the solution. These two features, in my opinion, stand out the most.
What needs improvement?
There are some improvements. There is a feature called Playbooks, which basically allows me to automate certain activities that would otherwise be manual. It's a very interesting feature, but there is room to improve it because, depending on the task you automate, the playbooks seem to have a hard time handling the task. So, it could be improved there. Even though it's a great feature, it can evolve further.
And the product as a whole Atlan could invest in features like a data marketplace. It would be interesting to have access to data because it is a data catalog, but it could also be the main marketplace where users request access to data to be able to define, and that access should be given in a seamless manner.
There is room for improvement on workflows as well, like the solution. It might not be the core of the solution, but they could start investing in having very robust workflows, especially for metadata data analysis. There is a simple workflow that could be improved.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using Atlan for seven months now since we started the partnership. But we began using Atlan for more than a year because we had a POC before.
So, we tested it a bit during the POC, finalized the partnership, and then began working with the tool in a productive environment, which is seven months now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We haven't had many problems with stability. In terms of the connectors, for instance, we have been able to catalog more than a million assets, and we haven't had a lot of problems with the connectors or with retrieving the lineage of these assets.
However, playbooks might fall a little bit from this category. The playbooks are a feature of automated tests, and we see that depending on the test we want to automate, sometimes the playbooks have a little bit of trouble scaling. So, that's the only area of improvement in Atlan.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have almost 400 users. Among these users, we have business analysts, data analysts, data scientists, data engineers, architects, InfoSec, and information security officers. So, we have a very wide variety of professionals taking advantage of it.
How are customer service and support?
We had to reach out to customer service and support for a couple of reasons, maybe questions regarding the product, questions on how to use it in the future, but also with technical issues as well, like maybe a connector not working or the playbooks weren't working. And they were always available. They helped us solve our issues. So support is very good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We had a legacy platform. We worked outside the site with it, and that's why we decided to look at the market for a different solution, and that's how we found Atlan.
How was the initial setup?
It was fairly easy. The connectors are very easy to use. So, we just have to get user information into our environment, and we plug that user into the connector, and it's just gonna crawl all our assets for cataloging. The setup was very easy for us.
Also, because it's a SaaS solution, it's software. We don't have to set up infrastructure. We don't have to install it. It's just our website. We log in to our website, and we are good to go. So, a very easy setup, very easy to start using, and start delivering value.
The infrastructure of the solution is a fast solution for us. We're using the software and the user licenses. The infrastructure is from Atlan, and it's cloud-based, and it's on AWS.
What about the implementation team?
We have three people who look like admins. I am one of them. We have two others, and each one of us takes care of one aspect. I do overall management and work on expanding our scope of governance and, so, working on integrations with other data sources. I have colleagues who take care of day-to-day activities, keeping the environment updated, managing user permissions, and similar tasks. So, basically, three people.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We pay per-user license. It's a different classification model than with other solutions, where they usually charge you for resources.
So, the more assets, the more data sources, the more processing you do, the more you pay.
Atlan only charges for users, and we established a model with them where we had a baseline of users. If we went past this baseline, we would pay proportionally to the number of users on the solution.
So, that was a better model for us. And because of this difference in models or classification, it was cheaper for us to go with Atlan.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did look for other solutions. We actually had a period of work meetings with different vendors and did POCs with different vendors.
We compared a few open-source solutions as well and did a sort of checklist. We compared all the vendors in terms of which was a better match for us in terms of features, fulfilling our expectations, and costs—trying to figure out which of them made sense overall.
We looked into Informatica, Collibra, Big ID, MANTA, and OpenMetadata as open-source data lineage solutions.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend using it because my experience with it has been very positive. To our strategy and our current maturity, it made a lot of sense, also within our budget. It was a very good cost/opportunity ratio, as other solutions were very expensive.
Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. Overall, it's a very good solution. It's a recent, brand-new, company-friendly solution. They have been able to fulfill our expectations.
We have been able to do what we wanted, to be where we wanted to be. They have a few issues here and there, but that's normal for any product or solution. Overall, we are satisfied.