Introduction

We are stoked to finally announce Paradime Radar, the real-time intelligence engine for analytics work.

The Problem

Data teams have always had this quite odd problem. They help every team across the organization measure and understand the impact of their work. They provide insights on other teams’ performances. Yet, ironically, they kind of suck at measuring the impact of their own work and organizational influence.

As a result, many data and analytics teams are viewed as cost centers, shadow IT operations, and are not perceived as the value-creators they actually are.

Uncountable LinkedIn posts and articles have been written about bridging the gap between analysts and their internal stakeholders. Data organizations spend months, if not even years, improving relationships with business units, running trainings, and building processes - just to then fail at measuring their own effectiveness.

You need to measure what matters, because without measurement you can't improve or prove value. To get a seat at the big table, you need to do both.

Introducing Paradime Radar

With Paradime Radar, we are giving analytics teams 60+ metrics out-of-the-box to measure, analyze, and improve their productivity.

Data leaders and analytics teams can now get important insights on:

1. How their analytics platform is performing?
2. How their team is performing?
3. How their warehouse spend is evolving?

With these crucial insights, teams can get a 360-view of the impact of their work and the value they bring to the organization.

As one of our users in the private preview said:

This will help us massively in tracking our dbt™ project’s health and performance as a whole. We will finally be able to identify, to such a granular level, inefficiencies in our pipeline and reduce compute costs.

Analytics Platform Performance

With Bolt, we have helped customers get setup and running dbt™ schedules in seconds on Paradime. We have also seen our users spend many painstaking hours trying to understand which:

• Schedules take the longest
• Schedules that fail the most
• Models that fail tests all the time
• ... and the list goes on and on

In Radar, teams can access metrics on their dbt™ schedules, models, tests, and source freshness with no additional work. Users can filter the data over time and for any schedule or model they want.

By default, we provide a set of metrics to get started, and users can also edit their dashboards and customize it for their workspace and organization.

Radar provides metrics on models by materialization so that you can balance between incremental and non-incremental models to manage cost. You will also be able to access metrics on model performance over time to uncover any execution anomalies when models take longer than expected.

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Team Performance

In software engineering, DORA metrics are a fairly well-accepted standard to measure and improve engineering team performance. Most data work has now become more software engineering work using dbt™. With this insight, we realized that teams needed to have a much better grasp of their activity and output. With Radar, teams can now measure their development and deployment velocity automatically so that analytics leaders can:

• Better balance workload between team members
• Better articulate team productivity and gradually improve over time
• Better communicate team activity across the organization

Most data teams in the current economy are overloaded because of shrinking team size and an increased workload. Radar's team performance dashboard is an effective tool for leaders and managers to drive objective conversations.

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Cost Performance

It's no secret that cost is a big topic of conversation for data teams. This has become even more important for teams using Snowflake. So, it was a no-brainer for us to make cost analytics available out-of-the-box to our customers. Teams can now review their Snowflake costs across their entire platform directly in Paradime, and answer questions such as:

• Which models or queries cost the most?
• Which tools are adding the most cost to the Snowflake bill?
• Where are the biggest opportunities to make cost savings?

Today, these questions can be answered in a handful of tools on the market. It involves identifying the problem in one tool, then going through multiple applications to fix, test, and deploy those changes, and then measure again. Paradime is the only platform where you can go from problem identification to fix deployed with no context-switching.

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As noted by another customer during our private preview:

Radar gives us a full 360-view of our data assets. Having operational analytics out-of-the-box helps us understand in detail the ROI of our data products - understanding runtime, compute, and team efficiency.

What's next?

Radar offers a new, exciting approach to how we run data teams. For far too long, data teams have struggled to articulate their value. With Radar, our goal is for that to improve - radically. We expect teams using Radar to be much better at proving their organizational value, which will lead to more effective budget conversations, and therefore help in creating even more impactful work.

BUT, this is only the start 🤩.

We don't want to stop at just measuring. We want to help you understand what to do when things are not going well. Next, we will be releasing real-time alerts so you can act promptly when metrics cross thresholds. We are also looking to integrate Radar with task managers, such as Jira and Linear, so you can view your team's performance end-to-end across the entire development cycle.

At Paradime, we are constantly looking to push boundaries and we never stand still - just like our customers.

Radar is currently in private-preview and will be available soon. If you want to try the private preview, you can sign up and let us know, and we can add you.

If you have feedback or ideas on metrics that we should make available in Radar, give me a shout on LinkedIn. We'd love to hear your thoughts!

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