Boris is the CEO of Census. Previously, he was the CEO of Meldium, acquired by LogMeIn. He is an advisor and alumnus of Y Combinator. He enjoys nerding out about data and technology, 8-bit graphics, and helping other startup founders.
Quickly discover & diagnose issues
When you build a product, especially a business tool, you need a “launchpad” of sorts. At first we created a page for users to get started and create their first sync. Now we have lots of organizations with dozens of syncs. The launchpad needed to evolve to manage the whole running system at a glance. I’m happy to announce we just shipped a delightful new app homepage.
The new homepage displays a summary of all the sync activity across a workspace. The dashboard helps users diagnose the health of the overall system across every live sync. From this starting point teams can detect and resolve alerts to ensure business teams are always working with the best data.
Monitoring and the reality of putting data into action
The purpose of our product from its foundation is to turn data into action. Instead of using insights to build charts with BI tools, Census powers live workflows in every tool across the business (e.g. advertising campaigns, personalized emails, routing support tickets, etc).
On the one hand this increases the leverage of your data investments. On the other hand, it means failures can cause more damage, especially when syncs go fast. When we think of our investments in the product, we always try to increase both the spread of data to more destinations and the quality of the data in those systems. The more consumers trust the data at their fingertips the more they'll automate and grow the business!
That's why Census automatically detects failures (e.g. we prevent sending conflicting duplicate items). It's why we have a GitHub integration that flags changes the engineering team is making when they break downstream business contracts. It’s why we integrate directly with security & observability platforms like Datadog. It's also why we recently shipped a flexible alerting system so that data & operations teams can detect and deal with issues as they occur. Some of our customers use Census to keep 1+ billion records in sync across a dozen systems and these alerts are crucial.
More than meets the eye
Our goal with this first release is to give you a bird's eye view of the last 30 days of activity and the ability to analyze that history to find anomalies and quickly resolve alerts.
Once you land on the page, you've got a few ways to zoom in and investigate issues with our rich filters:
Filter to the last 12 hours, 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days of activity
Display the aggregate of all records, or filter to successful vs. failed records
Group by destination or by status
Pick a single destination as a filter
Here's an example of diving into a single destination and looking at just its failed records.
On the side panel you can see all the open alerts in your system. This is a great inbox of issues you may want to address. The alerts auto-resolve when the related sync recovers, so you know anything in the list is something worth investigating.
Scale to infinity
We work with startups and with the world's largest companies. We work with B2B teams syncing 10K accounts and B2C behemoths that sync 1B+ users. The best way to ensure everyone can take advantage of our service is to ensure it's observable and auditable to the lowest level of detail. The new homepage is quite flexible and it's built on top of the rich layers of observability in our system. The homepage should help you resolve most issues directly but if you want deeper observability of our system, check out our groundbreaking warehouse writeback capabilities and our SIEM integrations into apps like Datadog.
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