If you're just starting out, look for someone with 'Full Data Stack' capabilities, like a Data Analyst with strong SQL and business acumen or a Data Engineer with analytics skills. This person can work closely with other teams to build initial pipelines and help shape your data platform. As your needs evolve, you can grow your team with more specialized roles.

Great question! As Salma Bakouk shared in our recent webinar, data observability is critical because it builds trust and reliability across your data ecosystem. With poor data quality costing companies an average of $13 million annually, having a strong observability platform helps teams proactively detect issues, ensure data freshness, and align analytics efforts with business goals.

Absolutely. MCP gives LLMs the ability to retain memory across multi-step interactions and call external tools, which is incredibly useful for root cause analysis. At Sifflet, we use this to build agents that can pinpoint anomalies, trace data lineage, and surface relevant logs automatically.

Embedding observability tools like Flow Stopper at the orchestration level gives teams visibility into pipeline health before data hits production. This kind of proactive monitoring is key for maintaining data reliability and reducing downtime due to broken pipelines.

Sentinel, Sage, and Forge are Sifflet’s new AI agents designed to supercharge your data observability efforts. Sentinel proactively recommends monitoring strategies, Sage accelerates root cause analysis by remembering system history, and Forge guides your team with actionable fixes. Together, they help teams reduce alert fatigue and improve data reliability at scale.

The move from ETL to ELT allows organizations to load raw data into the warehouse first and transform it later, making pipeline management more flexible and cost-effective. However, it also increases the need for data pipeline monitoring to ensure that transformations happen correctly and on time. Observability tools help track ingestion latency, transformation success, and data drift detection to keep your pipelines healthy.

Absolutely. By integrating historical sales, real-time transactions, and external data sources like weather or social trends, data observability platforms enhance forecast accuracy. They use machine learning to evaluate and adjust predictions, helping retailers align inventory with actual consumer demand more effectively.