A New Data Architecture with Accurate Insights – Kentik

Before:

Siloed and Decentralized Data Hurt Kentik’s Bottom Line

To support its business operations, Kentik was leveraging a variety of data integration vendors and platforms, such as Fivetran, Looker, and Google BigQuery, all of which needed to not only operate seamlessly, but the architecture had to also be scalable to drive and support the organization’s growth. The initial challenge was not necessarily with the tools but with the manner in which they were initially implemented and maintained.

Additionally, Kentik didn’t have good data visualizations to assist its business goal setting, prioritization, and decision-making processes. This was due to the number of data silos that had been built up over time leaving the company without a single source of truth for all its data.

Solution:

A Modern Data Architecture Providing a Single-Source-of-Truth

We recommended a modern data architecture solution with some of the current software platforms Kentik was using, along with some additions.

This new architecture included integrating the various tools that were already in place as well as implementing a new dbt instance for data modeling, data quality and data source freshness. By leveraging dbt as part of its data stack, Kentik is now able to keep business logic in the backend helping to improve overall query time within Looker.

The three main areas that we focused on to improve Kentik’s data analytics, insights, and resourcing challenges included:

Dashboarding

• Developing a company-wide dashboard in Looker to provide a comprehensive and cohesive understanding of Kentik’s business as a whole, instead of disparate and segmented views.
• Creating product-specific dashboards to bring product and sales data into one place for the first time to understand both revenue trends and data usage. This allows Kentik to identify clients not fully leveraging their products so they can proactively decrease churn by coordinating product utilization and sales data.
• Implementing a data health and monitoring dashboard to ensure data quality and integrity.

Financial Insights

• Leveraging dbt snapshots to gain insight into how Kentik’s sales pipeline changes over time allowing the company to better understand and maximize its sales funnel.
• Enabling Kentik to glean insights related to sales inflows and outflows based on time horizons. Users are now able to adjust date ranges to analyze projected sales for any period.

Recruiting

• Collaborating with Kentik’s recruiting agency, to understand their recruiting process and pipeline. We recreated agency’s UI visualizations for Kentik creating a single dashboard for the most important recruiting insights.