2024 was a transformative year for Secoda, marked by the release of powerful features designed to simplify data management and governance. From making data more accessible to automating tedious processes, we’ve equipped teams with the tools they need to trust their data and drive better decisions.

Read on to learn more about what we prioritized this past year. Each update reflects our commitment to helping teams work smarter, faster, and more confidently with their data.

1. Discover: Making data searchable and accessible

Secoda’s Discover tools help teams quickly find and understand their data, ensuring everyone stays on the same page and avoids miscommunication.

AI-powered search for everyone

Secoda’s enhanced AI-powered search offers an upgraded, vector-based engine designed for speed and precision. Unlike traditional search tools, it allows users to search in plain language and delivers results tailored to their needs. Designed to cater to all users—technical or non-technical—it ensures reliable data access while maintaining strict adherence to role-based access control (RBAC) and organizational policies.

Key benefits:

• Enhanced security: Users only see data they are authorized to access, safeguarding sensitive information and maintaining compliance.
• Plain language search: AI-powered search allows users to find data using natural, conversational language, eliminating the need for complex queries or technical expertise.
• Personalized results: Search results are tailored to user interactions, prioritizing the most relevant data for individual workflows.
• Integrated insights: Secoda’s search reflects data usage across external tools, offering a comprehensive view of resources.
• Contextual clarity: Search results include metadata, lineage, and quality insights, helping users quickly identify the best data for their needs.

This intelligent search functionality empowers users to find and access the right data effortlessly, ensuring teams can work confidently and effectively.

Align your team with a single source of truth

Secoda’s Centralized Glossary eliminates confusion caused by inconsistent definitions and unclear metrics. By providing a unified space for managing key terms, metrics, and definitions, it ensures everyone in your organization works with the same reliable information.

Key features and benefits:

• Unified platform: Combines the Dictionary and Metrics into one accessible space, making key information easy to find and manage.
• Improved search: Synonyms and related terms simplify finding relevant data and reduce ambiguity.
• Real-time collaboration: Built-in commenting lets teams refine and align definitions together.
• Faster decisions: Consistent, clear data definitions help teams make decisions confidently.
• Reduced errors: A single source of truth eliminates misaligned terminology and costly mistakes.

With Secoda’s Glossary, teams can access reliable, consistent information to work smarter, faster, and more effectively.

Enhanced collaboration with Slack and AI integration

Secoda’s updated Slack integration now includes bi-directional syncing, ensuring updates flow seamlessly between Secoda and Slack. Teams can receive real-time notifications about data changes, approvals, or issues in Slack and respond directly within their channels. This enhancement allows teams to stay aligned, resolve questions faster, and maintain productivity without switching platforms.

Key benefits:

• Real-time updates: Bi-directional syncing keeps Secoda and Slack aligned, ensuring teams are always up-to-date on changes and issues.
• Automated data requests: The AI-powered bot automates up to 50% of common data requests, like identifying data sources or defining metrics, saving valuable time.
• Self-serve discovery: Non-technical users can easily find data, ask questions, and create queries using plain language, reducing dependency on data teams.
• Improved productivity: Data teams can avoid repetitive questions, stay focused on impactful work, and respond more efficiently to high-priority needs.
• Contextual insights: Secoda AI integrates metadata, lineage, and quality insights directly into Slack conversations, making data discovery faster and more relevant.

These updates make it easier for teams to access and collaborate on data directly in Slack. With advanced AI capabilities and real-time syncing, data teams and stakeholders can save time, reduce manual processes, and stay productive within their existing workflows.

Custom Catalog views

Secoda’s custom Catalog views make it easier to navigate and access the data you need. By saving filtered views and personalizing catalog navigation, teams can quickly locate critical information and collaborate more effectively.

Key benefits:

• Faster access: Save filters and create personalized views to quickly find the data you use most often.
• Improved collaboration: Share custom views with your team, ensuring everyone stays aligned and works efficiently.
• Streamlined navigation: Tailor the catalog to your specific needs, reducing the time spent searching for resources.

Custom Catalog views enhance data discovery by making your catalog more accessible and intuitive, empowering teams to focus on insights instead of searching for information.

Secoda’s Discover tools streamline data access and collaboration by providing clear, consistent information through features like the Glossary, which ensures teams share accurate definitions and aligned metrics. Improved search capabilities and Custom Catalog views help users quickly locate the data they need, tailored to their specific workflows. Collaboration tools like bi-directional Slack integration and real-time commenting keep teams connected and productive without disrupting their existing processes. With Secoda, organizations can focus on making informed decisions rather than spending time searching for information.

Increase productivity with the Jira integration

Data teams can seamlessly manage data requests by syncing Jira issues directly into Secoda's Questions feature, allowing them to view all Jira issues, comments, priority levels, assigned users, and tags within the Secoda interface. Secoda automatically syncs a question's title, description, assignee, priority, and status with its linked Jira issue, as well as any comments that are created, updated, or deleted. Questions in Secoda can be pushed to Jira as issues, and all properties are synced bi-directionally between Secoda and Jira, ensuring consistency across platforms. By centralizing data requests and questions, the integration helps maintain data quality and governance, ensuring that all data-related inquiries are properly tracked and addressed.

2. Catalog: Save time with automated organization

Secoda’s Catalog tools simplify data management by automating repetitive tasks and keeping resources organized, so teams can focus on what matters most.

Work smarter with automations

Secoda’s Automations take the hassle out of manual processes, helping teams keep workspaces consistent, accurate, and well-organized without extra effort.

Key benefits:

• Metadata management made easy: Automatically update tags, ownership, documentation, descriptions, and resource statuses to ensure everything stays accurate and up to date.
• Effortless organization: Automatically add resources to the right Teams or Collections, keeping workspaces tidy and easy to navigate.
• Seamless communication: Notify team members directly via inbox, email, or Slack, ensuring everyone is informed with minimal effort.
• Bulk updates in seconds: Make changes across multiple datasets or resources at once, saving time and maintaining governance standards.

With these features, teams can spend less time on tedious tasks and more time on strategic work, improving efficiency and reducing errors.

Effortless issue management with Jira integration

Secoda’s Jira integration simplifies how teams manage Questions by enabling seamless collaboration between Secoda and Jira. With bi-directional syncing, teams can push Questions directly from Secoda into Jira, keeping comments, statuses, and updates in sync across both platforms. Each Question links back to Secoda, providing full context and ensuring that teams can easily track, manage, and resolve issues in one centralized place.

Key benefits:

• Streamlined workflows: Manage Questions where your team already works, reducing the need to switch between tools.
• Enhanced collaboration: Bi-directional updates ensure everyone stays informed and aligned, no matter which platform they’re using.
• Full context for issues: Links to Secoda provide complete visibility, making it easier to understand and resolve Questions efficiently.

This integration helps teams save time, improve collaboration, and stay organized, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.

Secoda’s Catalog tools enable teams to streamline their workflows, ensuring data management is both efficient and effective. By automating tedious tasks and fostering seamless collaboration, teams can maintain organized, accurate workspaces while staying focused on what matters most. Whether it's managing metadata or resolving issues with full context, these tools help teams work smarter, save time, and deliver greater impact with confidence.

3. Monitor: Gain visibility and confidence in your data

Secoda’s Monitor tools help teams track data quality and pipeline performance, so they can quickly identify and fix issues, keeping their data reliable.

Transforming data quality with automated scoring

Secoda’s Data Quality Score (DQS) evaluates data for completeness, accuracy, and consistency at the table level. Integrated with tools like dbt Tests, it lets teams monitor data quality within their existing workflows.

Key benefits:

• Real-time insights: Quickly identify missing data and inconsistencies with actionable suggestions.
• Focus on what matters: Prioritize high-impact issues to address critical resources first.
• Automated scoring: Eliminate manual audits with automated quality checks.
• Prove ROI: Use scores to track improvements, justify investments, and secure stakeholder support.

DQS turns data quality into a measurable process, reducing errors, improving decisions, and building trust in your data.

Build trust in your company data 

Secoda simplifies data quality monitoring with its no-code tools, making it accessible for both experienced data engineers and non-technical users. Setting up monitors is fast and intuitive: select assets, define thresholds, and start tracking critical data metrics without needing any coding expertise. Whether it’s row counts, data freshness, or custom metrics, Secoda ensures real-time insights into your data’s health.

Key features and benefits:

• No-code monitoring: Intuitive setup allows anyone to create monitors, reducing technical barriers and improving accessibility.
• Comprehensive metric tracking: Monitor row counts, freshness, uniqueness, null percentages, and more—or define custom metrics with SQL queries.
• Efficient coverage: Apply filters to assets like production tables and create multiple monitors simultaneously, ensuring full monitoring coverage in minimal time.
• Proactive anomaly detection: Real-time alerts flag unusual trends or issues, such as cost spikes or unexpected data drops, so teams can act quickly.
• Prioritized insights: Use DQS to identify and focus on high-priority assets, ensuring critical data is always monitored effectively.

Secoda’s data quality monitoring tools empower teams to confidently manage and maintain reliable data. By combining no-code setup, comprehensive metric tracking, and real-time anomaly detection, Secoda helps teams build trust in their data and respond proactively to issues. With tailored insights and efficient monitoring workflows, teams can focus on driving decisions and innovation with confidence.

Streamline data deployments with built-in testing and impact analysis

Secoda simplifies data workflows by automating testing, alerts, and impact analysis, enabling teams to deploy data changes faster while minimizing risks. With built-in validation checks, centralized documentation, and dependency tracking, Secoda ensures every change is informed, auditable, and disruption-free.

Key benefits:

• Early issue detection: Prevent costly disruptions by catching potential issues before they impact downstream processes.
• Impact analysis: Forecast downstream effects of schema changes and view dependencies from warehouse tables to BI reports, helping teams make well-informed decisions.
• Centralized documentation: Monitor dependencies and changes in one place, ensuring deployments are auditable and transparent.
• Proactive alerts: Notify stakeholders about potential downtime or issues, maintaining trust and minimizing operational disruptions.

Secoda’s CI/CD tools empower teams to deploy reliable data faster by combining automated testing, real-time alerts, and comprehensive impact analysis. With streamlined workflows and proactive monitoring, Secoda helps teams maintain data quality, minimize risks, and deliver seamless updates that keep stakeholders confident and informed.

Improving workflow visibility with job monitors

This year, we’ve introduced new job monitors to help teams stay on top of their pipeline jobs and maintain confidence in their single source of truth. 

Key features:

• Job duration: Monitor how long jobs take, spot trends, and resolve bottlenecks to optimize workflows.
• Success rates: Track completed jobs to ensure smooth operations and maintain system reliability.
• Error rates: Quickly detect and fix job failures to minimize disruptions and maintain data quality.
• dbt: Secoda integrates with dbt Cloud and Core to streamline monitoring and management of data resources. It links dbt model details, documentation, and run statuses with datasets, enabling visualization of data flows, detection of inconsistencies, and efficient model deployment. Secoda provides insights into job runs, including statuses, triggers, and timing. Users can monitor runs in real-time, address errors, and receive Slack notifications. Once job monitors are created, analytics for job monitors are available to keep a pulse on performance.

These tools provide real-time visibility into your workflows, empowering teams to confidently manage pipelines, reduce inefficiencies, and ensure data accuracy.

Focus on what matters with usage analytics

Secoda’s usage analytics provide insights into your most-used tables, queries, and users, helping teams focus on high-impact resources. By analyzing trends, teams can retire outdated entries, optimize resource management, and keep the data catalog clean and efficient.

Key benefits:

• Prioritize high-value data: Identify frequently accessed resources to ensure efforts are directed where they deliver the most value.
• Maintain an organized catalog: Remove low-use or redundant resources to keep the catalog streamlined and aligned with governance standards.
• Enhance observability: Use popularity-based monitors to prioritize critical assets and reduce focus on less-used resources.
• Save time: Quickly locate relevant, high-use data with popularity-based sorting, enabling faster decision-making and improved productivity.

Secoda’s usage analytics make it easy to focus on what matters most, helping teams allocate resources effectively, maintain a tidy catalog, and improve overall efficiency. By prioritizing critical data, teams can make better decisions and maximize their impact.

Optimize query performance and compliance

Secoda’s query and cost monitoring tools streamline query performance, maintain compliance, and optimize resource usage. With automated insights and visualizations, teams can uncover inefficiencies, reduce costs, and ensure data usage aligns with organizational policies.

Key benefits:

• Improve query efficiency: Identify slow-running or inefficient queries, pinpoint users or roles driving high compute costs, and optimize for better performance.
• Simplify governance: Query logs provide clear visibility into data access and usage, supporting regulatory compliance and ensuring adherence to organizational policies.
• Visualize query behavior: Query summaries use intuitive charts and graphs to help teams spot trends, outliers, and performance bottlenecks at a glance.
• Streamline troubleshooting: Metadata offers instant insights into query impacts and dependencies, reducing the effort needed to trace errors or assess changes.
• Enhance collaboration with lineage: Built-in lineage connects queries to the broader data ecosystem, helping teams anticipate change impacts and resolve disruptions faster.
• Save time with automation: Automated query tracking and documentation eliminate the need for manual processes, freeing up hours for higher-value tasks.

Secoda’s query and cost monitoring tools empower data teams to optimize performance, reduce costs, and simplify governance. By providing clear visual insights and automating time-consuming tasks, teams can focus on driving efficiency and maintaining compliance.

Secoda’s Monitor tools offer teams the visibility and insights needed to maintain reliable, high-quality data. By combining intuitive setup, automated monitoring, and real-time alerts, Secoda ensures critical data is always under control. These tools empower teams to address issues proactively, prioritize high-impact resources, and focus on driving decisions and innovation with confidence.

4. Governance: Secure data and scale collaboration

Secoda’s Governance tools give organizations the control they need to protect sensitive information while allowing teams to collaborate confidently and securely.

Team-specific access controls

Secoda’s access controls ensure only the right teams can view sensitive data, reducing risks and improving compliance.

Key features:

• Granular permissions: Assign precise access to specific schemas, databases, or folders to limit exposure to sensitive data.
• Centralized management: Manage permissions directly in Secoda, saving time compared to setting up access manually in each data source.
• Tailored data views: Show team members only the data they need for their work, reducing clutter and making it easier to find relevant information.
• Secure collaboration: Give teams access to the data they need while keeping sensitive information protected and compliant.

By providing precise access controls and tailored data views, Secoda empowers teams to collaborate securely while maintaining compliance and protecting sensitive information.

AI-driven collaboration with role-specific personas

Secoda’s Role-Specific AI Personas empower admins to create tailored AI agents designed to meet the unique data needs of different teams or roles. For example, you can build a Salesforce-specific AI agent for your RevOps team, ensuring they get answers relevant to their work without wading through unnecessary details.

Key benefits:

• Quick answers: Role-specific guidance ensures users get relevant, accurate responses without sorting through unnecessary details.
• Boosted productivity: Context-aware insights help teams spend less time searching for information and more time acting on it.
• Custom support: Personas adapt to individual needs, resolving questions quickly while upholding data governance standards.

This feature ensures every team in your organization can confidently access and utilize the data they need, fostering efficient collaboration and better decision-making.

Identify and protect sensitive data with PII tags

Secoda’s PII (Personally Identifiable Information) scanning workflow makes it easy for organizations to identify and manage personal data. By automatically tagging columns based on customizable keywords, such as “first name” or “address,” Secoda helps teams safeguard sensitive information and meet privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.

Key benefits: 

• Simplified privacy management: Automatically identify and tag personal data, ensuring it is accessed and used only by authorized personnel.
• Customizable keywords: Tailor detection to match your organization’s specific data privacy needs by adjusting keywords for PII identification.
• Enhanced governance: Strengthen data management by clearly labeling sensitive information and enforcing privacy policies.
• Data security: Secure personal data against unauthorized access, reducing risks of breaches or misuse.
• Regulatory compliance: Ensure compliance with privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA, avoiding penalties and building trust.

Secoda’s PII scanning workflow provides a simple, efficient way to manage and secure personal data. By tagging sensitive assets automatically and integrating privacy safeguards into daily operations, it supports compliance, enhances governance, and protects against unauthorized access—helping organizations maintain trust and privacy with ease.

Secoda’s Governance tools empower teams to securely manage sensitive data while fostering collaboration. Features like team-specific access controls, Role-Specific AI Personas, and PII scanning streamline compliance, protect privacy, and ensure data is accessible to the right people. With these tools, organizations can confidently balance security and collaboration.

Advancing data governance in 2025

We’ve accomplished a lot this year, but we’re just getting started. Looking ahead to 2025, Secoda will continue to lead the way in advanced data governance with exciting features like:

• Data Access Requests: Streamlining how teams request and approve access to source data.
• Policies: Automating rules to ensure consistent governance across resources.
• Custom Roles: Allowing organizations to define functionality and access at a granular level.
• AI Agents: Empowering teams with tailored, intelligent support for data-related tasks.

As we evolve, our goal remains the same: to help teams confidently search for, access and manage their data while maintaining security and compliance. Thank you for being part of this journey—we’re excited to keep building solutions that make data governance simple, scalable, and effective.

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Additional notable releases from this year

Catalog  

‍Expanded Integration Support and Improvements:

• New Integrations
  • Matillion
  • Airbyte
  • Hex
  • Coalesce
  • AWS S3
  • GCS
  • Pager Duty
  • Airflow Plugin
  • Astronomer
  • SQL Server Reporting Services
  • Monte Carlo
  • Superset
  • Cyera
  • Trino
  • Druid
• Enhanced Integration Setup:‍
  • Redesigned setup workflow for easier configuration and management‍
    • Collaborator Invitations: Invite teammates to assist with integration setup.‍
    • Customizable Syncing: Adjust schema and group syncing preferences to tailor workflows.‍
    • Pause/Disable Integrations: Manage integration activity with a single click.‍
    • Resource Filtering: Focus on relevant data by filtering resources by title.‍
• Streamlined Navigation and Syncing:‍
  • Improved metadata syncing with features like:‍
    • Push Metadata to dbt: Align Secoda metadata with dbt models.‍
    • BigQuery Policy Tags Syncing: Apply governance policies consistently across catalogs.‍
    • Confluence URL Integration: Link imported Confluence document URLs for seamless navigation.

Enhanced Collaboration and Clarity:

• Inline Resource Mentions: Add resource links directly in descriptions for improved clarity.
• Commenting on Resources: Enable context and feedback directly within resources.
• Custom Property Support: Add metadata to resources for better categorization and discovery.

Discover

• Browser extension enhancements: Access Secoda directly from your browser with improved navigation, catalog-wide search, and compatibility with additional data visualization tools.
• "Did You Mean" Search Suggestions: Enhance search results with intelligent suggestions that correct or refine queries for better accuracy.
• Improved Sorting: Options for sorting by popularity, update date, or relevance help users find critical data more efficiently.
• Filter Enhancements: Advanced filters allow users to find specific data faster, including by owners, tags, or custom properties.
• Enhanced Search Capabilities:some text
  • Improved autocomplete and sorting options in search results make it easier to find the most relevant data quickly.
  • Ability to save filters and bookmark frequently used views for streamlined discovery.
• Integrated Query Summaries: View detailed summaries of queries, including history, execution times, and related resources, all in one place.

Monitor

Improved Monitor Creation Workflow:

• Required Owner Assignment: Assign an owner during monitor creation to establish accountability.
• Optional Subscribers: Add subscribers to monitors for automated updates and better team visibility.

Incident Management Enhancements:

• Incident management with Jira integration: Sync incidents with Jira for easy tracking and faster resolutions.
• Activity Logs: View detailed logs of incident history, including thresholds, row counts, and status updates.
• Incident Auto-Resolution: Automatically resolve incidents when measurements return to acceptable ranges.

Lineage Integration with Monitoring:

• Lineage Graphs with Job Information: View the job (e.g., from dbt, Fivetran, or Airflow) that created specific edges in the lineage graph for better troubleshooting.
• Lineage filtering: Simplify complex lineage graphs by filtering resources or integrations to focus on key relationships.

Anomaly Detection Improvements:

• Monitor Sensitivity Control: Adjust the sensitivity of automatic threshold detection to fine-tune anomaly detection.
• Monitor Annotations: Mark anomalies as normal to improve the accuracy of anomaly detection algorithms.

Expanded Monitoring Support:

• Microsoft SQL Server: Full monitor support for SQL Server resources.
• Azure Blob Storage: Monitor dbt Core workflows connected through Azure Blob.
• Support for Trino, Metabase, and Snowflake Tags: Ensure consistent monitoring across diverse integrations.

Governance

SCIM and Role Syncing Enhancements:Expanded Role Management: Sync user roles in addition to groups for more granular governance.

• Audit Logging for User Authentication Events: Track role and user authentication activities to improve security auditing.