ER/Studio vs. ObservePoint

Data Architect is well suited at organizations of all sizes. It is never too early or unnecessary to enforce proper modelling and design standards on data solutions, and this tool will help that greatly by providing an industry leading data modelling tool, ability to import ETL mappings for data lineage, enforcing and managing naming conventions through the naming convention tool, and publishing of data dictionaries through the report publisher. I was successfully able to build models, provide traceability, and document source to target with lineage throughout for both the business (by providing business definitions in the descriptions), and technical teams (by documenting ETL instructions in text fields) along with field level mapping (by creating "Attachments" representing data sources, tables, and fields) providing easy search capabilities using business friendly terms

Incentivized

ObservePoint is a great tool for automating page testing and standardizing campaigns to observe accurate customer insights. You can identify customer mapping journey. They also help in data protection and insights which are very important and essential these days. They should work more on easy interface designs. Overall, it is the best.

• ER/Studio has the ability to provide consistent field names and data types through domains, which are templates. This provides a way to have consistent naming of common fields, like CreatedBy and the data types for the fields. They also have the ability to change all the fields that use that domain to a different data type.
• ER/Studio provides the ability to create custom macros. These macros can be used to apply everything from standard fields based on domains to naming all constraints and indexes. I've also used a macro that comes with ER/Studio to spell check field and table names.
• My favorite feature is the ability to compare your data model to databases for deployments of changes, and to other data models.

Incentivized

• The UI for ObservePoint is intuitive and robust. This makes training new engineers and using the product easy and productive.
• All Audit exports are formatted as tab delimited text files making the data easy to analyze and manipulate in a Spreadsheet or database.
• The list of tag vendors that are discoverable is comprehensive making it easy to interrogate most any tagging implementation.
• Standard reporting within the UI is robust and easy to consume.

• ER\Studio licensing can be cumbersome and upgrading from one version to another usually takes several phone calls and emails to the licensing group to get the update installed and running.
• The repository can be slow when the model count gets larger. By large I mean 20 to 30 models.
• A nice feature that I would like to see is table comments be displayed on the model along with the attributes. Currently you have to choose between the two.

Incentivized

• Page details, although interesting, are not very useful as the data is too granular and not possible to integrate with other analytics data for insights.
• Some of the custom tagging may be a little complicated, so sometimes we need an engineer or an ObservePoint tech to help us out.

Incentivized

ObservePoint has a robust solution that is well supported and is continually innovating to meet new business and technology needs.

It's easy to navigate and learn. The reporting and output are intuitive and robust features for finding and identifying actionable insight.

I've only experienced one system availability issue in the 3 years we've been using it.

Sometimes it can get a bit slow when auditing particularly huge sites but recent upgrades in infrastructure have done a lot to mitigate this behavior.

I can call or email support and both get quick turn around. The only issue is they are on the west coast (US) and have a west coast work schedule and I'm on the East coast.

Incentivized

Support is very strong indeed and has been consistent over the last 4 years. They are also friendly and tag nerds like me!

Instructor was knowledgeable and delivered the content well.

It's easy to find the information you need when you need it and it is easy to consume.

Start with small audits until you have determined what you might want to filter out.

ER/Studio is the most mature, reach in features and quality and therefore useful. Unfortunately, it lacks compatibility with AWS Redshift.

Incentivized

I have not used any other product other than ObservePoint for my requirements. there are a number of features for which it has proved helpful. Technology Governance ensures our data collection tools and processes are executing as planned, so our organization can make better decisions based on better data and so on

Incentivized

I have not reached an unreasonable product limitation as of yet.

• ER/Studio has had a positive impact on my project as we can develop the data model and have a clear understanding of business needs before we continue with the development phase.

Incentivized

• ObservePoint has helped us quickly (within minutes) catch when a process or pathing on the website breaks, which allows us to fix it quickly. Whether technical/dev or analytics issues, without ObservePoint, they could have been undetected for weeks.

Incentivized