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by clemenss 1355 days ago
Hi HN! We’re Clemens and Felix from Cito - super excited to launch Cito (https://www.citodata.com) today, the first truly actionable data observability solution built for small data teams.

Many data teams we’ve spoken with spend hours writing and maintaining tests in dbt, only to achieve a poor outcome. Tests are great when testing whether specific expectations are true, but don’t work well for use cases where data patterns may change over time, for example, because of seasonality. When relying on tests only, teams regularly end up in situations where business stakeholders identify silent data issues in dashboards first, eroding trust. In such situations, understanding the implications of an issue and debugging can be a very manual and time-consuming process.

To help teams ensure trust, Cito automatically detects data anomalies and communicates them in the relevant column-lineage context via Slack, allowing users to instantly understand the root cause of an anomaly and its impact. Cito executes tests based on pre-defined frequencies, but it is also possible to execute tests whenever tables refresh in Snowflake, offering a near real-time monitoring experience. Next to our web app, we provide programmatic access via our REST API, e.g. to trigger tests based on external events.

Existing solutions are either expensive ($50-300k/year) or lack actionability. What’s different about Cito is that we leverage column-level lineage and other actionability-enhancing features such as in-app SQL model accessibility to make the incident response super straightforward. This facilitates our users to quickly and easily identify the root cause and downstream impact of anomalies that may occur in their data, allowing them to respond quickly and prioritize appropriately.

We would love to hear your thoughts, ideas and experiences!