By Anthony Lempelius
Published on July 9, 2024
Our recent webinar on “Accelerating Your Data and AI Journey with Alation Consumption Tracker and Peak Performance” highlighted the power of Peak Performance, a native Snowflake app built by Spreems, an Alation systems integrator partner, using Alation technology.
The webinar tells of the challenges behind the app’s inception, explains the massive power it brings to data modernization efforts, and provides a detailed demonstration of the Peak Performance app.
Below is a quick recap, but definitely don’t miss the replay and demo.
Many enterprises have been working hard to modernize data estates, but it’s not an easy task. As companies grow, scale, and continually adjust, data naturally becomes siloed across too many systems and tools, too many data warehouses, and too many on-premises and cloud-based data solutions. And, as time goes on, that complex environment becomes very expensive to manage.
As Alation’s Technology Alliances Director, I work closely with our joint Snowflake-Alation customers daily to help them overcome these and other challenges, become more data-driven, and build a winning data culture. One consistent pain point is curating data to simply understand where data resides, who is using it, and the intended application. Another is on the infrastructure side, where organizations grapple with legacy systems that weren't designed to handle modern data speeds, volumes, and formats.
It all creates friction that slows business users and data professionals, inflates costs for the enterprise, and impedes cloud data migration and modernization efforts. It also blocks organizations from adopting other modern solutions and becoming AI-ready.
Hearing about these challenges sparked an idea. What if we could help these organizations:
Accelerate cloud migrations by assessing and understanding their legacy environments to create a strategy and plan for data migrations,
Expand governed adoption to ensure data is governed, high quality, and used appropriately, and
Optimize for efficiency by moving costly queries to off-peak usage times while empowering workers to do more.
We saw this as a perfect opportunity to use our Query Log Ingestion (QLI), a patented technology integral to the Alation DNA. QLI analyzes your data estate to see how your top users are querying your most popular data assets. Data leaders can then understand which data sources are frequently used and which teams are running which queries, map data consumption across the enterprise, and measure the effectiveness of different data programs. Those insights can then be used to identify power users, optimize queries, and prioritize data sources for migration or retirement.
It is this type of data intelligence that fuels data-driven journeys. QLI gets even more powerful in Alation Consumption Tracker (ACT), which is used to monitor data migrations, see where data resides, and provide visibility into queries being run and by whom, so compute credits are optimized and costs can be controlled.
Our partner, Spreems, saw the value in making turnkey ACT insights for easier and faster customer deployments, so its team developed Peak Performance. This native Snowflake app (get it in the Snowflake Marketplace) uses Alation Analytics and ACT to offer a comprehensive suite of tools for monitoring and analyzing Snowflake’s performance with access to user and query analytics to identify data bottlenecks and optimize query execution.
As a turnkey app, Peak Performance gives technical and nontechnical users easy access to deep visibility with over 60 pre-built reports and dashboards to visualize query, data source, Snowflake, and other insights. It creates a sort of gamified dashboard that improves time-to-value for data migrations and modernizations by providing more visibility.
Spreems even made Peak Performance flexible, too, so — starting in July — you can customize the pre-built dashboards and build your own from scratch. For AI-readiness, Peak Performance will also leverage Snowflake Cortex, a fully managed service designed to unlock the potential of generative AI technology to easily build and deploy AI-powered applications.
To learn more and see the complete Peak Performance demo, watch “Accelerating Your Data and AI Journey with Alation Consumption Tracker and Peak Performance” on demand.