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Data Pipelines with Apache Airflow
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Ry Walker

Astronomer Clickstream - User event data routing for analytics

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Capture user events and route them straight to the best tools and data warehouses for analytics.

Priced based on event volume, not MTUs.

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Dylan Kim
I'm the cofounder of an e-commerce company thinking about how to start warehousing my user data. How is your product different than Segment?
Ry Walker
Maker
Hi @dylan_kim thanks for question. If you're just starting, and don't have a lot of monthly tracked users (MTU) yet, Segment may be the better option (how's that for brutal honesty!) Our sweet spot is with savvy data teams inside low MTU monetization companies. They have higher costs with analytics tools (due to volume of their user events) mixed with frustration around lack of flexibility that SaaS tools generally provide — to the point they are considering rolling their own data ingestion platform. Also, we have some customers who must ingest _their customer's data_ for their platform to function, which will become more common in the AI/ML era. Segment isn't really designed with that use case in mind. Because we're writing our ingestion recipes in plain ol' Airflow and exposing the scripts and Airflow's interface to you, recipes can be tweaked or even rewritten for any use case.
Vishnu Vankayala
@dylan_kim You should consider www.customerlabs.co/actionrecorder, easy and fast to set up without writing any code. Pushes the data into Google Bigquery for warehousing purposes.
Ry Walker
Maker
I’m Ry Walker, CEO. We built the SaaS edition of Astronomer as a low-friction, low-cost way to help you ingest and route user event data. Hope you give us a try. But we’re not stopping there… Because one-size-fits-all solutions from SaaS tools often don’t provide enough flexibility, the SaaS edition of Astronomer is a precursor to our forthcoming open and private cloud editions of the platform, which will help savvy data teams gain full control of their data routing stack without having to pay the full price of going it completely alone. Open/private cloud editions are in alpha testing, ping me if you’d like to kick tires (ry@astronomer.io).
John Lauck

The new UI is the slickest UI in an analytics product ever!

Pros:

Astronomer lets you control and own your analytics data while using tools you already use to query and analyze.

Cons:

There are some learning curves when transferring data between schema-less to schema-ful data stores.

Scott Bowler
Looks fantastic - do you have any plans to be GDPR compliant?
Ry Walker
Maker
@scotty_bowler yes we're working on it. Astronomer will be considered a data processor under GPDR, so we'll issue an updated Data Processing Agreement (DPA) that complies with GDPR rules, including compliance with data transferred outside the EU. We'll also add new product features to help our customers be compliant when their users request they delete/suppress data. We're also rolling out capability to allow our customers to "run their own Astronomer" as a service in their private cloud; this gives them the option to fully keep their data within the EU.
Scott Bowler
@rywalker Thanks for the detailed reply - love the sound of the private cloud
Tobias Jaeckel

Fantastic and very knowledgable team that goes to great lengths identifying customers' needs and making sure to support them. The solution is extremely flexible, hence the need to dig a bit deeper what specific use cases to tackle with Astronomer.

Pros:

Easy to get started w/ Clickstream to centralize analytics data, very powerful when adding fully customizable aggregation w/ managed Airflow

Cons:

No built-in dashboards for visualizing insights, funnels, etc. but team is ready to propose proven solutions for this.

Marco Gurnari
Looks awesome. Great tool !
Cintrifuse

No better way to gobble multiple data points into one platform.

Pros:

Super easy to use and robust

Cons:

nothing comes to mind

Nitin Dhawan

Curios to understand what AirFlow is? Is it to build custom data-munging pipelines?

Pros:

Clickstream has been a great lifesaver for us. Saved 3 man-months of developer effort integrating different marketing tools within 1st month

Cons:

My favorite two tools are not listed as integrations.

Ry Walker
Maker
Hey Nitin- thanks for the review. What are the tools you mentioned that we don’t integrate with? We’d love to throw them on the roadmap. Airflow is a data pipeline management system that allows pythonistas to author, deploy and monitor data pipelines.
Kevando
Hello Stro, looks dope. Any plans to have a react-native library?
Kevando
@schnierules Awesome, I will check this out.
Christoph Fey

Working with their API is quite easy and works like charm

Pros:

- helpful and friendly people (sales, support, engineers)

- open GraphQL API

- good documentation

- tutorials

Cons:

- still breaking changes

- knowledge base is still quite small

Ry Walker
Maker
Thanks Christoph - yeah, we should probably talk about our GraphQL API (Shout out to @apollographql) more - thanks for review!
Andy Cloyd
How is Astronomer different from integrating natively with tools such as Google Analytics or Amplitude?
Ry Walker
Maker
@andy_cloyd through the power of analytics.js (created by the founders of Segment) it uses a common event model, so you code your events to one API, and they get translated and relayed to each integration. Some integrations can work server-side (on Astronomer servers) too, so in that case you do less Javascript work in your user's browser. Other server side integrations include sending data to your data warehouse, or to S3, or to your Kinesis, etc. So as analytics teams scale up, they tend to want more control of the data and data processing, vs. relying only on a web of SaaS tools. If your product is MVP stage then wiring directly with GA and Amplitude is a rational thing to do - less moving parts. But once you start experimenting w/ different tools, come on over :)