Announcing Snowflake’s Investment in Metaplane

Today I’m happy to announce that Snowflake has invested in Metaplane, the leading data observability tool. 

As the first technically validated Premier partner in the data observability space, we knew from the beginning that partnering with Snowflake would fundamentally change how teams work with data. Since then, we’ve gained more than 100 joint customers, including scaleups like Ramp and ClickUp and established enterprises like Bose and Sotheby’s—spanning verticals from financial services to manufacturing to consumer goods.

Now, we believe there is an opportunity to strengthen our existing partnership, and that feeling has been shared by the Snowflake team.

❝ We chose to invest in Metaplane because it helps ensure the high-quality data necessary across all our initiatives,” said Ashwin Kamath, Senior Product Manager, Observability at Snowflake. “Outside of the perfect technical fit and strength of their team, joint customer feedback on how Metaplane and Snowflake work together has been resoundingly positive.”

This investment follows our 6x revenue growth in the past year, driven by our product-led approach, long-term partnership with Snowflake, and best-in-class customer experience. All this momentum has set both of us up to scale to new heights.

Snowflake paved the way for data observability

Since the advent of the relational database in the 1960s, companies have run SQL scripts on cron jobs to check data quality. But data quality coverage is limited because it would compete with other workloads, like BI dashboards.

Today is different. Snowflake emerged as the leading Data Cloud in the 2010s. But like the iPhone, Snowflake is both a transformative technology in itself and also an enabling technology of other categories. Snowflake’s storage-compute separation, horizontal scaling, and virtual data warehouses made it possible to have continuous visibility into the state of your data: data observability. 

If you’ve ever heard “This number looks weird,” or “This dashboard is broken,” or “Our data isn’t ready for GenAI,” then data observability is for you. 

Data observability does for data what software observability tools like Datadog, Splunk, and Dynatrace do for software: ensure that every company trusts the data that powers their business. Metaplane continuously monitors all dimensions of data quality from source to consumption, ensuring proactive detection, resolution, and prevention of data incidents. 

Snowflake enabled the category of data observability and continues to be a key partner in its ongoing development, serving as the main integration point for all observability platform players. Amidst their expanding list of partnerships, we’ve been lucky to be a long-term, trusted partner of Snowflake—a partnership that’s become even stronger with this investment. 

The road so far

We’ve always believed that data observability should be a “no-brainer” for data teams, the same way installing Datadog, Splunk, or Dynatrace is one of the first actions an engineering team takes. To achieve this means having a product, adoption, and pricing aligned with our core user: busy data people.

Our product is already optimized for the Snowflake Data Cloud. We use metadata as efficiently as possible so that data teams can power critical use cases confidently. We also integrate with all of the broader ecosystem surrounding Snowflake, from ELT to transformation to BI, for monitoring and column-level lineage that spans source to destination. As it stands, we eliminate surprises so that data is AI-ready.

This is only the beginning.

What the future holds

There’s a dilemma that data teams have faced for decades: delivering data value often supersedes ensuring data quality. This trade-off is largely due to the limitations of a non-parallelized shared resource model. With elastic, virtual warehouses and extensive metadata, Snowflake has eliminated this trade-off.

They’ve made it easier than ever for data teams to serve use cases like business intelligence, machine learning, and operationalization. But with data lying at the core of these use cases, the stakes for poor data quality are raised higher than ever. 

Lapses in data quality cost organizations an average of $13 million per year, and its impact varies depending on its use in different industries. For instance, in 2021, problems with Zillow’s machine learning algorithm led to more than $300 million in losses. About a year earlier, limitations on table rows caused Public Health England to underreport 16,000 COVID-19 infections. And of course, there’s the classic cautionary tale of the Mars Climate Orbiter, a $125 million spacecraft lost in space because of a discrepancy between metric and imperial measurement units.

But by focusing on data quality initiatives across the organization, from data profiling to data cleansing, you reduce the risk of bad decisions in business processes, which helps you make smarter strategic calls, delight customers, and give stakeholders more confidence in data-based decisions. 

This investment ensures that as Snowflake continues to build out developer capabilities in their platform, data observability—and subsequently data quality—will remain a critical area of focus for all users. Our goal is for all data teams to see which issues arise with their applications and data, why they arose, and how to address them.

What does this mean for our customers?

Metaplane already provides best-in-class data observability for Snowflake customers. With this partnership, Metaplane will integrate seamlessly into Snowflake’s unique features for Data App Development and Data Engineering workloads, enabling data teams to have visibility into every part of their data infrastructure. 

To be announced in GA by Summit 2024, Metaplane now integrates with Dynamic Tables, Secure Data Share, Snowpipe, Tasks, and Streams, so you can see all of these features within your column-level lineage graph. You’ll also be able to monitor Event Tables for common issues like failures in Snowpark. Together, these integrations empower customers with some of the most critical workloads such as data engineering, collaboration, application development, and AI/ML. 

Metaplane’s near-term product roadmap for the Snowflake Data Cloud integration includes deeper integration to monitor the previous features, the ability to alert on incidents, and new observability experiences. We will also provide integrations to Streamlit in Snowflake, Native Apps, and Snowpark Container Services. 

Snowflake will only continue to enable more expansive use cases for your teams to build. Data, and subsequently data quality, will only continue to rise in importance. No matter what you choose to build, through our close partnership with Snowflake, Metaplane is there to make sure that your data quality foundations are solid. 

If Snowflake is the iPhone of data platforms, Metaplane is the AirPods – seamlessly integrated and best when paired together. Learn more about our partnership and integration here.

Get started with these Metaplane features in less than 30 minutes for free. Just connect your Snowflake instance and we'll immediately generate column-level lineage from source to BI in a unified visualization map.