What are the (rapidly) evolving trends in the data space? And how is Unravel responding—especially for FinOps? What’s on the product roadmap for 2023? How can you get the most out of your Unravel deployment today?
Unravel leadership presented a virtual year-end update to talk about emerging industry developments, give a sneak peek into what’s in store for 2023, and share our customers’ best practices on how they’re using Unravel to maximize business value.
Here are some of the highlights, with video clips.
The rapid rise of FinOps
CEO Kunal Agarwal discusses his vision for Unravel and how cost governance and cost optimization has become a top challenge for data teams running workloads in the cloud. Some 60% of organizations encounter cloud cost overruns. Some of that is due to increased workloads, but another big reason is that companies just have difficulty understanding how to run more efficiently. But that kind of “actionable intelligence” is the foundation of FinOps—engineering, finance, and business teams making collaborative data-driven decisions about spending.
It’s the same kind of insights—at both a granular and holistic level—you need to tackle performance issues and/or to migrate to the cloud reliably and efficiently. Kunal shows how customers are using Unravel to realize tangible benefits to optimize performance and cost, and recaps our recent $50 million Series D funding
Unravel roadmap for 2023
Vice President of Product Eric Chu gives a glimpse into what’s ahead for the Unravel platform. Over the next year, you’ll see Unravel expand its capabilities to include integration with data quality solutions, expand its coverage on the modern data stack, and introduce additional FinOps observability, intelligence, and automation features. Specifically:
- Unravel will support Snowflake
- Databricks SQL and Unity Catalog support
- Amazon EMR Serverless, as well as Glue and Kubernetes
- Integration with data quality solutions, starting with Great Expectations
- Integration with ServiceNow, PagerDuty, Jira, and more
- Top-down FinOps dashboards, as well as enhanced AI insights
We are collaborating with customers now to get design input and user feedback, enabling early access to preview features.
Unlocking value with Unravel
There are probably features in Unravel you already have access to but may not be leveraging to their fullest extent. Chris Santiago, Unravel VP of Solutions Engineering, digs into some hidden treasures and best practices that other customers use on a daily basis.
Chris walks through a FinOps-focused use case demo to show how Unravel capabilities helps at each stage of the cost-optimization lifecycle process: reporting (visualize, track, allocate), self-service insights (reduce, improve, empower), and guardrails & automation (control, prevent).
His demo takes us from a bird’s-eye view overview of Databricks costs, then walks through the various Unravel reports you can access to drill down into get precise insights—cost breakdown, user and usage, node downsizing recommendations, event analysis—into where the spend is going at a granular level, where there’s waste, where optimization can have the greatest impact, etc. Then Chris touches on how Unravel’s AI recommendations fit in, as well as run through how to set up automated guardrails and real-time budget-tracking alerts to proactively control cloud costs.
The demo is specific to Databricks, but there are dozens of reports available for any environment Unravel supports. Some of them are in beta, so reach out to your technical account manager (TAM) for access to or training on these reports. In the meantime, explore these key Unravel features.
New professional services offering
Unravel’s Global Head of Customer Success, Matt Sangar, introduces our new professional services to help you leverage Unravel’s full capabilities. Whether it’s improving application performance, lowering cloud costs, reducing MTTR and support ticket volume, or improving data team productivity, Unravel professional services can help you get the most out of Unravel quickly. He has added two new roles to your Customer Success team, an Unravel engineer and a project manager, that will work with you as an extension of your team.
Expanded training options
Unravel is also introducing new on-site training enablement for in-person learning, at basic, advanced, and custom level, for Admin and Ops teams, AppDev and Support teams, and FinOps—budget management training for Finance counterparts.
Sometimes you might need extra help, or there are other teams who want/need to learn about Unravel. We now offer half- or full-day Unravel Data Days for on-site, in-person (or Zoom) workshops. We are also introducing office hours, when users can sit down with Unravel engineers to troubleshoot apps in real time.
For more information about our new training programs, professional services, access to beta reports, or anything else, please contact your TAM and we’ll take care of you!