This way, you can pick up problems that might be happening in the source systems. This includes the execution time of the jobs that deliver the data, as well as whether those jobs are running at all. Monitor the External Jobs Delivering the Dataīecause the data is coming from external sources, it makes sense to monitor those external sources. That said, let's look at some other ideas for expanding the visibility of your ETL processes. These two principles can be executed in a wide variety of ways, depending on your data architecture or environment. 5 Additional Ideas for Monitoring ETL Processesīefore going into some ideas, it's worth mentioning that on a general level, there are two things that can help you check on your ETL processes: checking the data flow between two databases or tables, and doing a validation check on data. What about problems with the delivery of the data from external systems? What about data that is incorrect? It might be a good idea to use a monitoring tool to expand the visibility of your ETL processes. Many Database Management Systems offer ways to monitor the ETL processes, such as mechanisms to check on individual ETL steps. And so, while ETL issues may not result in downtime for operations, it does have an impact when data is used to make critical business decisions. These scenarios result in incomplete and inaccurate data respectively. Say, for example, there’s a problem with an external source system and the data doesn’t get delivered. And if things go wrong with the ETL step, then you have a situation where the data is either not loaded into the database, or it’s loaded incorrectly. It’s also a complex one, too, because many of the ETL processes deal with different data input formats, different data volumes, and so on. These ETL processes are the barrier for entry for the data coming into the data mart or warehouse, and that means that this is a big point of failure. This is where Extract, Transform, and Load (referred to as “ETL”) processes come into play. This incoming data is in different formats and structures, and so it needs to be consolidated and loaded into the database in a way that matches how the data is stored there.

And most data architectures look very similar: there is a number of data sources, such as external systems or apps, which deliver data into the central system. Because of this, databases and data warehouses are central to many environments. Just about every kind of company or organization has a reliance on data for daily operations.

Etl processes