Hi Alvin users and fans,

We hope you had a fantastic August! Now that the dust has settled, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the exciting updates and enhancements we brought to Alvin during August.

New Features & Improvements

Anomaly grouping

Some anomalies come in groups, it’s easy to understand when you look at a lineage lineage, an anomaly in volume would often “trickle down” the graph and cause a cascade of anomalies - but the advantage is that lineage can be used to detect this and present it more concisely! Our new functionality Makes it less noisy and faster to find the root cause, also with a direct link to the lineage graph, where the volume layer is there to help!

GCP project cost anomaly detection

A requested feature from BigQuery users has been cost anomaly detection on a GCP project level, as this is often associated with different teams or domains. This has now been rolled out and has already caught large cost spikes for some of our customers.

Service account anomaly detection

 A similarly requested feature from BigQuery users has been cost anomaly detection on a service account project level, as this is often associated with different services/functionality like Airflow, dbt or other more company/domain specific workloads. This has now been rolled out!

Behind the Scenes: Tackling Bugs & Refining the Experience

We've also dedicated time to squashing pesky bugs and fine-tuning Alvin to ensure a smoother, more enjoyable experience for everyone. Some key accomplishments include:

  • UI/UX improvements: Improvements to the anomalies views, added charts, hovers and interactivity.

On the Horizon: What's Next for Alvin

We're always looking forward, and here's a sneak peek at what we're working on for the coming months:

  • Entity page overview improvements: Currently there is a huge amount of metadata available about entities. Cost, workloads, insights, tags, lineage, usage, queries, storage/volume and the list goes on, we get that it’s confusing. Sometimes it’s even a bit confusing to us! Everything is really connected so we are planning to make a more unified view so that all information regarding i.e a table is available in the same place.
  • Lineage splash screen: Currently the lineage explorer supports a variety of use cases, but is not very intuitive and requires manually setting up filters - we are planning to set up a set of pre-built queries to make it easier to jump into a specific use case. As these are all filters that are part of the URL, and something that is already used internally in the UI for deep linking we believe we can build something useful here fast! Stay tuned.
  • Table Cleanup: Currently there is functionality for finding potentially unused tables but there is not a clear sequence of steps for actions. We are working to create a more specific flow with clear outputs that can be used (i.e a list of statements to remove unused tables/models etc)

Your Feedback Matters to Us!

We're committed to continuously improving Alvin, and your feedback is essential to our progress. We'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on the recent updates, or any other ideas you have. Just let us know by replying to this email or reach out on LinkedIn or Slack.

Thank you for being a part of our journey!

The Alvin Team

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