What is Data Visibility?

Data visibility refers to the ability to see, track, and understand data as it moves through an organization's systems. It consists of three main components: lineage, monitoring, and access transparency. Lineage is tracing the origin, transformations, and journey of data throughout its lifecycle, while monitoring involves real-time tracking of data health, quality, and performance. Access transparency provides visibility into who is accessing data and how it is being used. Poor data visibility can lead to multimillion-dollar mistakes, reputation-shattering incidents, and legal implications, including operational risks, flawed decision-making, loss of stakeholder trust, financial impact, compliance issues, reputational damage, and business disruption. To avoid these consequences, organizations need to take a proactive approach to data visibility by implementing best practices such as building a solid data platform with access controls in place, using tools that provide real-time monitoring and quality assurance, and ensuring collaboration and governance through a single control plane and metadata management. A reliable partner like Dagster can help organizations achieve better data visibility and reliability, accuracy, and compliance.