To buy or to build a Data Observability platform?

By: Oxana Urdaneta

The first answer that might come to mind when asking this question is every company and data organization should build their own. But after thinking more, the answer is not so easy.

Any data organization or team would benefit from having a Data Observability platform, getting the benefit from automated anomaly detection, greater visibility on status and quality of your data pipelines, and overall being able to run better operations on your data and gaining efficiencies with your engineering capabilities. One of the challenges specific to data engineering (not the same in software engineering), is that in data engineering you can do everything right: you can profile your upstream data sources, build and test your pipeline, run unit testing before deploying and do post deployment monitoring and validation to ensure the data looks good. You can master these steps! But the challenge is you don’t know what incoming data will flow through your pipeline in 1 week, 1 month or 1 year! And that’s why data operations seem to be never ending. The good news, that’s where a strong data observability platform works as a 24/7 intelligent assistant to let your teams proactively know what is wrong across all your data.

Back to build vs. buy, if your organization were to decide to build such a tool, one of the advantages is that you understand better your specific team’s needs and workflows. However, the reality is this will be another project and not the top priority for your organization. On the other hand, if you buy such a platform, like Konstellation data, this is all we do and therefore it’s our top and single priority.

Our innovation will be focused on this single product while you may want your data team to focus their energy and technological innovation more aligned with your organization’s core competencies and strategy.

Also, for Konstellation, we compete with other products in the market, so we are constantly challenging outside, are in the edge of innovation, and pushing our boundaries to build the best data observability platform. Whereas internally, there’s no comparison.

In conclusion, when you buy such a solution, you get a much better product, that keeps enabling your team and their capabilities, at a much better price. It’s a win-win for both parties!