Sync logs: Full record observability in your data warehouse | Census

Katy Yuan
4 April 2022

Here’s a glimpse of the next generation in Operational Analytics observability: We’re excited to announce Sync Logs for all of your Census syncs!

This means Census writes detailed logs of each data point you’ve synced so you can audit, troubleshoot, and create alerts using the most granular information.

No more ⚠ surprise bugs or sleepless nights fixing pipeline issues.

☸️ The data warehouse is your central hub

We store your logs in your warehouse so you can analyze and combine them with all your other data. This ties into our mission to centralize all data and business logic in your warehouse, THE central hub for your data team.

Native integration with your data warehouse means:

  • No wrestling with S3 buckets, external files, or additional tools to get visibility into your data pipelines.
  • Compatibility with anything that speaks SQL, so you can query logs with the tools you already have – including BI tools, SQL clients, and data testing frameworks like Great Expectations or dbt.
  • You can even incorporate sync logs into your Census SQL models!

🔎 Full observability for Operational Analytics

Sync Logs are another part of Census’s commitment to end-to-end observability, so every user can sync with confidence. For real-time visibility into API calls, check out the API Inspector we released in February.

Using Sync Logs, data engineers, analytics engineers, and operations teams can achieve:

  • Full Visibility: Every sync can generate complete and detailed logs so you know exactly what happened with your data. Audit individual records, troubleshoot API rejection reasons, and investigate data discrepancies.
  • Real-Time Monitoring: Stay up-to-date with the status and health of your data pipelines by monitoring successful and rejected records over time to identify spikes and anomalies in your syncs.
  • Granular Alerting: Proactively triage issues and solve problems faster by setting up alerts triggered by specific rejection reasons or when specific errors reach a certain threshold.

Now, you have full records that guarantee visibility into any sync you choose, so you can audit, troubleshoot, and create alerts with the complete picture of every single data point.

👉 Read the product documentation for Sync Logs

ℹ️ Sync Logs are only available on Platform plans

💕 Customer use case

Issuu, a digital content publishing platform, syncs data from their warehouse to destinations like Iterable. Suela Isaj on the data & analytics team uses Sync Logs to troubleshoot and audit their syncs. She’s able to access the detailed description of each failure and the reason for failure in their data warehouse, helping her find root causes and quickly implement huge improvements.

With Sync Logs, any Census user can:

  • Audit when individual records were successfully synced to your SaaS tools and which operation was performed to investigate data discrepancies.
  • Troubleshoot API rejection reasons for all of your records across all syncs.
  • Rollback data to a previous state if there's an urgent issue.
  • Pro mode! Use the Census Slack integration to notify the right teams of data issues.

Stay one step ahead of data problems and anticipate issues before they happen!

🔮 What’s next?

We’re constantly improving our observability features to make them easier to use and more impactful. Coming soon for Sync Logs is the option to "Download all rejection & skip reasons” for every destination through the Census UI, and other enhancements based on your feedback!

Get a demo or try Census for free!