Gain Full Visibility Into Your Data Stack with Alation and Coalesce

As the modern data stack has evolved, understanding how each tool and system in your data architecture consumes and processes data has become a complex, often disjointed effort. Today, we commonly see data stacks that have separate tooling throughout each stage of data processing. Using solutions like Coalesce for data transformation brings significant benefits for data engineering teams and organizations, from automating repetitive manual tasks and enhancing productivity to enabling transparency and collaboration on data projects. However, understanding how your data got to Snowflake, or how your data is used after it is transformed using Coalesce alone, is still a manual, time-consuming effort. 

This lack of end-to-end visibility into data flows can have consequences not just for the data team, but across all lines of business. Data consumers may end up making decisions based on inaccurate interpretations of data definitions and metrics, and data teams may have to work with limited or zero visibility into the impact of up or downstream data processes—all of which could delay or impede all data-driven processes in the business. 

Alation enables data teams to solve this problem by unifying Coalesce and any other systems within your data stack, providing transparency into how each data asset in your organization is processed, from ingestion all the way to your BI tooling. 

Now, with the Coalesce and Alation integration, data teams and business users can fully understand how data is processed and used in their organization. With Alation, any user can view data at any point throughout the data stack. This eliminates silos of information stored in data systems and enables users to understand the complete picture, regardless of the number of data sources or tables. 

This end-to-end transparency provides teams with important information, such as how certain tables were joined together or how a metric is defined logically, and with all of the documentation across all data points. In addition to column lineage in Coalesce, users gain a consistent view of all data assets. Better understanding of where data comes from establishes trust in its accuracy with the entire organization, not just the data team. 

Additionally, data teams can perform impact analysis throughout the data stack within a single system. Instead of having to log in to each system and troubleshoot data issues or determine how they are used downstream, you can now instantly analyze the bottlenecks or breaking points of your data process, without ever having to leave Alation. For example, if a table in Coalesce is missing a column, you can easily trace the entire lineage all the way back to your Fivetran ingestion to see where the problem may have occurred. 

With the Coalesce and Alation integration, organizations can finally unify their data stacks, gaining an end-to-end picture of how data is flowing through each process. Data teams can easily understand how tables are created, empowering all data consumers with consistent metrics and definitions, and establishing trust with the rest of the organization. Now you can easily connect and conquer your data stack using a best-in-class transformation solution like Coalesce while gaining the full picture of your data using Alation. 

Josh Hall is a Product Marketing Data Engineer at Coalesce.