New feature: Audit History

It’s 8:15 AM, and you’ve already solved a stale data issue that you noticed with the help of Metaplane. The end of week dashboard check is in 45 minutes. You’re relatively new to the data team and have been tasked with owning the marketing data pipeline; luckily, the work’s already been started, so you have access to key datasets and a suite of data quality monitors in Metaplane.

One of those freshness monitors is what helped you catch your issue from earlier today. You understand how the monitor “works” as far as using your metadata to determine what constitutes a stale data issue. You even understand how to visually trace lineage upstream to see where that issue originated, which helps to solve for the issue. But as part of your incident retrospective, you’ll also want to:

• Understand why and what guardrails were set up for this object in the past
• Understand how to mitigate the risk of this happening again

Introducing: Audit History

By using our newest insights, you’re able to see a history of information to help you answer exactly those questions. Because you weren’t the one who originally set up the monitor, this new timeline shows you:

1. Who set up the monitor
2. When configurations were last changed
3. Related incidents from the past 

All of this - underscored by notes that multiple teammates have contributed to, so you know:

1. They set up freshness tracking for that object because of a faulty 3rd party application API that frequently errors out.
2. Alert sensitivity was reduced as a result, so that a wider range of tolerance could be applied given the understanding of the faulty API 
3. This incident was attached to several other dbt models that other data team members own, so you can proactively give them status updates on resolution.

You resolve the incident and add a row count monitor after discovering that the brittle pipeline loaded partial data in previous runs, making sure to add a note about why you set it up. You’re a hero, and it’s not even 9 AM.