One of the worst things about working in data is facing the “data mess”. What do we mean by the “data mess”?

The data mess happens when it becomes impossible for data teams to govern and manage data. As their data evolves, before long they end up struggling with sprawling data dictionaries, enormous, outdated spreadsheet tracking plans, and data governance is an unmanageable nightmare. 

This leads to a data wild west, where domain owners create their own versions and conventions of similar analytics events, leading to duplicates and inconsistencies. In turn,the mess piles higher, and things only get worse. 

By the time exhausted data practitioners look for a solution like Avo, their data is in bad need of repair. Sometimes it’s such a sh*tshow that they’re ready to rip up the tracking plan and start again. But whether or not you decide to build on what you have or rip it up and start fresh, what does it take to get from bad, messy data to good data?

1. Understand what’s wrong with your existing data
2. Design and commit to what your data should look like
3. Start working on the fixes

This journey is painful, time consuming, and often soul destroying. 

In fact, the journey of resolving the data mess is so arduous that we’ve seen many start this journey only to get stuck in data audits and give up in frustration. This is what inspired us to build Inspector, to provide a way to find, fix, and prevent data errors—not in months or years—but in days. Let’s dive in to show you how. 

Visualizing the data mess

Inspector makes this possible by extracting the schemas of your event data (just your metadata, never your customer’s actual data) and displaying all your inconsistencies in one place. 

These are your data quality “issues”—highlighting every possible instance where your data deviates from what it should look like. This is the data mess, visualized. And now that we can finally see the mess, we can start to conquer it. 

The best way to start conquering the mountain of messy data is to build out the tracking plan—a central source of truth that dictates the shape of your data, how your events are defined, and how your events contribute to tracking key metrics. 

Building a tracking plan, a set of rules for your event data tracking, used to be a long, manual process. Now, it can be done in the click of a button. 

Kickstart data governance with a single click

You can finally say goodbye to the manual process of building your tracking plan, one event at a time. 

You can, of course, create your tracking plan through meticulous data design. But for those who want to quickstart their data governance, you can do so with clicking a single button. Yes, it’s that easy. 

This was only possible by overcoming some major engineering and UX challenges. We set out with the goal to get you from zero to tracking plan in less than 90 seconds. The interesting thing about that challenge is that it takes a lot of computation to instantly figure out all the variations that a single event has in your stream of data. (Stay tuned for the engineering post on how we  reduced that from over two hours to under two minutes).

The result: We rebuilt our infrastructure and achieved our goal.

Build your tracking plan 80x faster than previously possible

It’s not only easy to build your tracking plan from Inspector. It’s lightning fast. 

From setting up Inspector, Avo will get your data up and running and let you select, review, and import your events in 89 seconds (we know, we timed it!). 

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Now you can build your tracking plan quicker than you can make your morning coffee.

Running natively in your favorite tools

For the first time ever, you can install Avo Inspector natively from your favorite tools. Inspector is now available as a native Segment Destination so you can get started with a couple of clicks. 

Inspector is ready to install within Segment today, and will be available within even more of your favorite data solutions in the near future. 

Your journey to better data starts here

We couldn’t be more excited for you to start moving to better data in seconds, with this new feature. At Avo, we’re all invested in your journey to robust, reliable data quality, and we’ll continue to refine and iterate on this functionality to make the process as smooth and easy as possible. 

Let us know how it goes!