Streamlining data incident management with Secoda & PagerDuty 

As data engineers, we're constantly juggling complex data infrastructures, ensuring data quality, and maintaining efficient workflows. In this landscape, having robust tools that work seamlessly together is crucial. That's why we're excited to announce the new integration between Secoda and PagerDuty, designed to streamline your data incident management process.

What is Secoda?

Before we dive into the integration details, let's quickly recap what Secoda brings to the table. Secoda is a comprehensive data management platform that consolidates your data catalog, lineage, documentation, and monitoring into a single, searchable interface. It's the go-to solution for data-driven organizations looking to:

• Reduce data stack costs
• Minimize data downtime
• Increase self-service capabilities through AI
• Automate data documentation and lineage

Secoda integrates with your entire modern data stack, including ETL tools, warehouses, BI platforms, and more, making it an indispensable tool for data teams working at scale.

Secoda is the first data management platform to connect data quality, observability, governance and discovery all in one place. With Secoda’s Monitoring features data teams can easily gain visibility into pipeline metadata, such as cost, query volume, and popularity. Secoda Monitoring already enables your team to proactively identify blindspots and be in the know about the health of your data and pipelines, and now take it to the next level with our native PagerDuty integration.

The Secoda x PagerDuty integration: Bridging the gap

Now, let's explore how the new PagerDuty integration enhances Secoda's capabilities and simplifies your incident management workflow.

Key Features:

The PagerDuty integration is designed to address the common pain points data engineers face when managing data quality incidents across multiple platforms.

1. Seamless synchronization:
   • Incidents triggered in Secoda are automatically synced to PagerDuty in real-time, eliminating the need for manual intervention.
   • This synchronization works for all types of Secoda monitors, including row count anomalies, data freshness issues, and custom SQL-based checks.
   • The integration uses PagerDuty's Events API v2, ensuring reliable and fast incident creation.
2. Bidirectional control:
   • Acknowledge and resolve incidents from either Secoda or PagerDuty – changes are reflected in both platforms instantly.
   • This feature allows team members to use their preferred interface without sacrificing visibility or control.
   • The bidirectional nature ensures that no actions are missed, regardless of where they're performed.
3. Unified incident management:
   • Maintain your existing PagerDuty ownership and escalation policies while leveraging Secoda's powerful monitoring capabilities.
   • Secoda respects and integrates with PagerDuty's sophisticated alerting rules, on-call schedules, and escalation procedures.
   • This unification allows you to centralize incident management while still benefiting from Secoda's data-specific insights.
4. Contextual data insights:
   • When an incident is created in PagerDuty, it includes rich context from Secoda about the affected data assets, lineage, and potential impact.
   • This additional context helps on-call engineers quickly understand the scope and severity of the issue, leading to faster resolution times.
5. Customizable alert routing:
   • Configure which Secoda monitors trigger PagerDuty alerts, allowing you to fine-tune your notification strategy.
   • Set up different PagerDuty services for various types of data incidents, ensuring the right team is notified for each issue.
6. Historical incident analysis:
   • The integration maintains a consistent incident history across both platforms, facilitating post-mortem analyses and trend identification.
   • Use this historical data to improve your monitoring thresholds and reduce false positives over time.
7. API-driven flexibility:
   • For advanced users, the integration exposes APIs that allow for custom workflows and automations.
   • Build scripts to programmatically manage incidents or integrate with other tools in your data ecosystem.

By bridging Secoda's data-centric monitoring with PagerDuty's robust alerting system, this integration creates a unified data incident management system. It addresses the full lifecycle of a data incident – from detection and notification to resolution and analysis – all while maintaining the flexibility that modern data teams require.

For data engineers, this means fewer tools to juggle, more context when troubleshooting, and ultimately, a more proactive approach to data quality management. Whether you're dealing with ETL failures, data anomalies, or performance issues, Secoda’s PagerDuty integration ensures that you're always in control and well-informed.

Setting Up the Integration

The setup process is straightforward:

1. Create a new service in PagerDuty.
2. Enable the "Events API v2" for the service.
3. Copy the integration key from PagerDuty.
4. Paste the key into Secoda's PagerDuty integration settings.

That's it! Your Secoda monitors are now connected to PagerDuty.

How It Works in Practice

Let's walk through a typical scenario:

1. Secoda monitors your data assets, such as table row counts or data freshness.
2. When a monitor detects an anomaly (e.g., unexpected drop in row count), it triggers an incident.
3. The incident is automatically created in both Secoda and PagerDuty.
4. Data engineers can acknowledge and manage the incident from either platform.
5. Once resolved, the status is updated across both systems.

This integration ensures that your team stays on top of data issues without constantly switching between tools or missing critical alerts.

Why this matters for Data Engineers

Data engineers are constantly seeking ways to optimize workflows and reduce cognitive load. Secoda’s PagerDuty integration rises to this challenge, offering several key benefits that address the pain points we frequently encounter:

1. Reduced context switching:
   • Manage incidents from your preferred platform without losing synchronization.
   • No more juggling between multiple tabs or applications to get a complete picture of an incident.
   • Save up to 15-20% of your time previously spent on navigating between tools.
2. Improved response times:
   • With alerts in both systems, you're less likely to miss critical issues.
   • Reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) by having all necessary information at your fingertips.
   • Configurable alert priorities ensure that high-impact issues get immediate attention.
3. Centralized monitoring:
   • Leverage Secoda's comprehensive data monitoring while maintaining your established PagerDuty processes.
   • Gain a holistic view of your data health across various sources and pipelines.
   • Easily correlate data incidents with infrastructure issues for root cause analysis.
4. Enhanced collaboration:
   • Easier handoffs between team members, regardless of which tool they prefer.
   • Improve communication between data teams and other departments (e.g., DevOps, Analytics).
   • Maintain a consistent incident narrative across tools, reducing miscommunication.
   • Scenario: A data engineer acknowledges an incident in Secoda, and a DevOps engineer can seamlessly take over the resolution process in PagerDuty without any loss of context.
5. Scalable incident management:
   • As your data infrastructure grows, this integration helps maintain oversight without increasing complexity.
   • Easily add new data sources and monitors in Secoda without changing your PagerDuty setup.
6. Customizable workflows:
   • Tailor the integration to fit your team's specific needs and processes.
   • Create custom escalation policies based on data criticality and business impact.
   • Automate routine responses to common data incidents, freeing up time for more complex issues.
   • Example: Automatically route data freshness issues to the ETL team and data quality issues to the data governance team.
7. Comprehensive audit trail:
   • Maintain a detailed history of all data incidents and responses across both platforms.
   • Simplify compliance reporting and post-incident reviews with a unified incident log.

This integration empowers us to be more proactive, efficient, and collaborative in our roles, ultimately leading to more robust and dependable data infrastructures. As the complexity of our data ecosystems continues to grow, having tightly integrated, specialized tools becomes not just beneficial, but essential. This is a significant step towards a more unified and effective data operations environment.

Looking ahead

As Secoda continues to evolve, we can expect more features that cater to the needs of modern data teams. Our goal is to provide a unified platform that makes data management, documentation, discovery quality and governance.

By bridging the gap between comprehensive data management and robust incident response, this integration allows data teams to maintain high data quality standards while minimizing downtime and operational overhead. Give it a try and tell us what you think!