Workstream.io announces sophisticated, free Slack alerts for all dbt users

NEW YORK, March 5, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Dbt is a powerful tool used by the masses for testing and modeling data, but the native alerting features fail to meet the most basic needs of most users, Cloud or Core. The primary issue is that dbt's native alerting does not provide critically needed information, and quickly causes alert fatigue for the data team, even at the lowest incident frequencies.

Many data teams have heavily invested in their data incident management processes, and the Workstream team invested months into speaking with them to learn exactly what is needed for everyone to course correct and improve triage.

Today's busy data people might see a dbt notification about an outage on their phone but not be able to triage it until later—or there's a chance they forget to dig into the issue later when they have system access. They also might not even realize in a subsequent run that something new requiring investigation has broken. This is where Workstream Slack alerts come in.

"Now when you connect your Workstream.io instance to your dbt project, and set up free Slack alerts, core information about data outages, including failed tests, blast radius, and data freshness checks become automatically communicated to users in Slack," says Nick Freund, CEO of Workstream.io.

"This new integration allows us to expose critical knowledge to our business teams and partners via dbt-powered documentation, and automate workflows around data incidents and quality via advanced Slack alerting capabilities and data status pages," says Workstream.io customer Dan
Antonson, Director of Marketing & Analytics Technology at Collegis Education.

"Data teams have been handcuffed by bad incident alerting for too long. I've personally experienced the pain of missing a major outage because I assumed I knew what I would see after clicking 'Open run in dbt Cloud.' Teams just need to be able to increase failure visibility while also maintaining flexibility as their team and investments in data quality grow and mature," says Ted Conbeer, Data Leader at Workstream.io.

Free Slack alerts are an added update to previously launched features including the ability to expose data status pages for critical data assets; and, the ability to leverage dbt projects to build business-facing documentation. Documentation includes data status pages, which are automatically created and updated for critical data assets like dashboards. They include the current status of the asset, a graph of historical up/downtime in the last 30 days, as well as a list of any current or historical data incidents, including their status and core context.

Workstream.io also provides an unlock to dbt-based knowledge about data via end-user documentation features. When leveraging any of the documentation features, including asset content overviews, the data team can pull in dynamic definitions of their dbt nodes.

Workstream's platform provides teams with an end-to-end workflow for data incident management, allowing them to alert on data incidents, quickly understand and triage issues, and manage stakeholder communications about data outages.  All of these features together are a meaningful departure from the lackluster systems data teams currently leverage, from alerts sent natively by data tools, or repurposed and traditional incident management systems.

"We believe that every dbt user needs better alerting, so in our continued commitment to improve upon your investments, we acknowledge that nobody wants to buy software right now. We've heard feedback, and in addition to free Slack alerts for dbt users, we're also announcing Workstream.io Core, a free path to efficient data incident management," says Nick Freund, CEO of Workstream.io.

About Workstream.io

Workstream.io is the new standard for data workflows. From incidents and tickets to access and insights, streamline all of your workflows via a purpose-built hub that natively integrates and automates work across your tools and teams.

With Workstream's centralized data repository, your data team will be able to manage and automate the chaos of data workflows like never before. With purpose-built incident and ticket automation, say goodbye to the time suck of diagnosing and communicating data problems and hello to organizational transparency with live status updates, dbt-integrated Slack alerts, and faster resolutions for your critical data incidents.

SOURCE Workstream.io