Criticality Score - A Smarter Way to Prioritize Data Issues and Reduce Alert Fatigue

By: Oxana Urdaneta

Every data professional knows the feeling of an endless to-do list and a packed schedule. And with limited time, we want to focus only on what truly matters. When data issues arise, it’s challenging to decide how urgent they are, whether they deserve attention, and how much of it. Should this issue even be prioritized? Should we drop everything and jump on it? Who else needs to be informed?

Not every data issue is equally critical; not all issues deserve the same focus and attention. That’s why we created Criticality Score at Konstellation as part of our Data Observability platform, turning prioritization from a guessing game into a data-driven decision-making tool.

Modern Data Observability and Its Challenges

Data observability is like a health checkup for your data. It gives you the power to understand your data’s performance, catch anomalies, and react quickly when things go wrong. It removes the need for data teams to manually check for issues across pipelines and tables by employing automation. But here’s the catch: not every detected issue has the same impact or demands the same urgency.

For example, if a pipeline fails but only affects an internal report no one has looked at in months, does it need immediate attention? Does it make sense for the data team to be notified? On the other hand, if an issue results in a customer-facing dashboard showing incorrect financial data, it’s critical to jump on it right away.

Data observability without intelligent prioritization can lead to two undesirable outcomes. Either:

• valuable time is spent on trivial issues.
• or crucial problems with severe business impact are overlooked. 

Konstellation’s Criticality Score is built to avoid these pitfalls by focusing your team on what truly matters.

Introducing Criticality Score: Prioritize What Matters Most

Konstellation’s Criticality Score is an intelligent, machine learning-based tool that rates issues from 0 to 100 based on urgency and impact. It is designed to capture and prioritize the issues with the most business relevance, helping your team focus on data quality where needed. Here’s how it works:

• Automated Urgency Assessment: It analyzes several factors, such as the issue’s severity, the reliability of affected tables (leveraging Konstellation’s Table Reliability Score), and the significance of the impacted data. Criticality Score assesses which alerts need immediate attention.
• Dynamic Learning and Adaptation: Criticality Score learns over time, adjusting based on changing usage patterns. As your business and use of data evolves, so does Criticality Score’s understanding of what’s critical. If the V2 dashboard is released and the data sources that feed the V1 are no longer used, the Criticality Score will see this and indicate it.
• Actionable Feedback: You know your business best. If you feel an issue is over- or under-prioritized, your feedback helps the algorithm improve its ratings, ensuring alignment with what matters most to you.

With these insights, Criticality Score turns your data monitoring into a prioritization engine that adapts to your organization’s unique data landscape.

With today’s complexity in data environments and issues happening across data sources, Konstellation’s Criticality Score standardizes the prioritization across all your sources, ensuring consistent, data-driven prioritization across the board. It doesn’t matter where the issue originates; the impact and urgency are always measured consistently.

Real-World Examples of why Prioritization matters

Imagine discovering a column in your customer table has 70% null values. If this column is for customer emails, that could impact your marketing efforts, so that’s a high-priority issue. On the other hand, if the address2 field is mostly null, this issue may be easily ignored without consequence. Criticality Score evaluates issues with this context, saving your team from needless alerts and directing attention where it can create real impact.

Without prioritization, it’s hard to separate what matters from what doesn’t. Criticality Score gives you an objective, data-driven perspective based on the actual impact on your data operations, not just on the loudest voice.

Avoiding Alert Fatigue and Noise

Alert fatigue is a real problem for data teams using traditional data observability tools. Too many alerts can overwhelm even the most organized data professionals, leading to missed issues or wasted time. Criticality Score addresses alert fatigue head-on by filtering and categorizing alerts based on urgency. Teams can set alert preferences based on specific Criticality Scores, receiving notifications only for urgent issues. This ensures that when an alert does come in, it demands attention.

Empower Your Team: #FixWhatMatters

Data observability tools aim to give time back to data teams, not take more of it. Criticality Score automatically sorts and prioritizes issues , saving your team from manual guessing. It lets them focus on high-impact tasks that truly matter. The entire organization benefits when teams spend less time triaging and more time on valuable work.

You can have peace of mind knowing that if something critical is happening across your environment (within hundreds or thousands of tables), the Criticality Score will bring it to your attention.

In the end, Criticality Score helps you take control of your data observability strategy, ensuring that your team operates efficiently and makes data-driven decisions that truly serve your business needs. With the Criticality Score, you confidently prioritize and empower your team to #FixWhatMatters.