Alation offers enterprise data intelligence solutions, including data search & discovery, data governance, data stewardship, analytics, and digital transformation. Alation operates in thethe data catalog market. With its Behavioral Analysis Engine, inbuilt collaboration capabilities, and open interfaces, Alation combines machine learning with human insight with the goal of tackle the most demanding challenges in data and metadata management.
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NetApp BlueXP
Score 9.2 out of 10
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NetApp BlueXP Classification (formerly NetApp Cloud Data Sense) uses artificial intelligence-driven technology to provide data governance across the entire data estate. Users can pinpoint cost-savings, identify compliance and privacy concerns, and find optimization opportunities.
Alation is well suited to helping a user find a column or even a query using a business term search. In this regard Alation is excellent because it's easy to not only associate these items with each other, but there are also many ways to link the column and/or query to that business term/concept
NetApp Cloud Data Sense (Cloud Compliance) is an AI algorithm that improves the way you interact with your data. We have used Cloud Compliance and it is effective and suited in Automatic discovery, mapping, and classification of all data. It simplifies discovery, classification, and labeling with powerful automation. It gives an accurate list of data sources, has a great analysis feature. We also used it to handle data in discernment. Cloud Compliance is appropriate and effective in all professional tech settings, from SBO to high industrial performance.
Ability to link objects using the @ symbol. It allows us to easily provide a way to get more information or context. So if the business concept is part of a hierarchy, we can link to the other terms in that hierarchy.
The customization is really helpful. Most object types have robust customization options. Others are less so, but it is improving. We've created multiple custom fields to support our data governance framework.
The search feature with filtering is helpful in narrowing down what you're looking for.
The lineage UI is not ready for primetime. I would not recommend this feature for my users at this time because it's too complex to understand and is visually difficult to track down specific paths.
The underlying infrastructure of the on-premise version of the software is fragile and unnecessarily complicated, using too many modules and technologies.
The license model of the on-premise version contains too many add-ons. I would like to pay one price and get all of the features.
Overall, we are happy with the functionality of the platform. While there are are areas that we would like to see further improvement in, the tooling is highly configurable and aligns well with our use case. A mature API layer makes it straightforward to integrate with other data tooling. Alation stands out for its pro-active engagement with their customers, both to resolve issues and in communicating their feature roadmap
Mostly because the search feature is case sensitive. This causes issues when users are searching for an industry standard acronym. These acronyms exist as attributes in thousands of places across our data ecosystem. Alation allows stewards to endorse attributes so that these endorsed items rise to the top of search results. The problem is no one types acronyms in caps in a search field. Alation returns results matching the case (lower-case) and in several instances the endorsed attributes don't even appear on the first page of results
The account management and technical support teams are both excellent. There is regular account manager engagement, and technical issues are generally resolved very quickly. The vendor engages us in product development through regular updates on the product strategy & feature roadmap.
Key insight from implementing Alation is that, as a cloud-based SaaS product, the majority of effort is not infrastructure-related but instead focused on security configuration and integration with existing platforms, including identity management, access controls, and metadata connectivity to core data systems. Because of its data profiling functionality, careful consideration had to be given to data security and data sovereignty.
Alation provided the right balance of connection with systems in use, trusted reputation and affordability. The product integrates with current ways of working and does not require reorganisation within other lines of business.
In contrast to others, NetApp Cloud Data Sense is driven by more powerful AI algorithms that have given space for efficient automated controls and reporting that enables users full privilege over their data. The automatic discovery is trusted, with maps and data classification. Then others analyze well, structured and unstructured data in the cloud, also visualize data better.
Provides a place where people can go to find things
When we first implemented, someone was concerned that people would now see what a mess our data environment was. I consider that a feature. We can't clean up if we can't see what we have.
