Artlist Boosts Data Workflows, Cuts Snowflake Costs 30% in One Month

Artlist, a leading SaaS creative technology company, leveraged Seemore Data to enhance data observability, streamline workflows and optimize Snowflake costs.

30% Cost Reduction
3 wasteful pipelines flagged

$7,300 Instantly Saved
from one dashboard alone

$2,000 Saved
by killing one unused table

50% Run-Time Reduction
on a stuck process

30 min onboarding
with full stack integration

Challenges solved for Artlist

Business

2.5 million+ high-quality, royalty-free digital assets

Location

USA, UK & Israel

Company Size

700+ employees

Trusted by

26 million users

Data Organization

2 teams, 23 engineers, 800% team growth in 3 years

Data stack

Since its launch in 2016, Artlist has experienced rapid growth, which placed immense pressure on its expanding data team, with key challenges including:

  • Data Engineering Bottlenecks: Rapid expansion led to tight timelines and shortcuts in best practices when using tools like Tableau, Airflow, and Snowflake.
  • Growth in Complex Data Pipelines: Difficulties in understanding data pipelines, business metric calculations, and data transformations due to a lack of comprehensive data lineage tools.
  • Dependency on Engineering: Non-technical users, such as analysts, frequently needed to consult the engineering team to understand data constructions, causing delays.

"Seemore Data provides comprehensive visibility to fully understand and assess our data pipelines, in terms of usage, cost and efficiency. This is crucial for enabling us to effectively communicate optimization strategies, ensuring better alignment with analysts, non-technical stakeholders, and data-consuming departments throughout the organization."
Hannan Kravitz, Data Engineering Team Leader
Complete and Actionable Data Observability Focused on Efficiency

Seemore Data was integrated across Artlist’s data stack to complete visibility into their data
processes, optimization recommendations and step-by-step instructions that provide continuous cost and efficiency control.

Complete Lineage Visibility

Allows the data team to plan, troubleshoot, communicate and optimize the performance of every data asset at every level — from query to data product.

Optimization Recommendations

Real-time anomaly detection and instant root-cause analysis proactively identify and
eliminate inefficiencies in data management and usage.

“We had a month with a growth of 30% in costs and that’s when we started using the insights Seemore Data gave us to see where the bottlenecks were or where as data engineers we should focus to find out how we can improve things. I was able to instantly drill into the workflow, the specific job and the specific task to understand what was ultimately increasing our Snowflake costs. And it took practically zero time and effort from me or my team”.
Hannan Kravitz, Data Engineering Team Lead
How the Data Team at Artlist Became More Efficient

Following a seamless 30-minute onboarding process to all tools on their data stack, Artlist quickly saw substantial improvements from the get go:

Optimized Pipelines:

  • $2,000 (approx) saved annually after unused datatable being refreshed every hour was identified and shut down.
  • $7,300 reduction of the annual cost of one dashboard after Seemore Data suggested adding a clustering column to their touchpoint table. A modified MERGE INTO statement was then used to update rows only when changes are detected.
  • 30% reduction in costs after the detection of three pipelines consuming excessive resources due to improperly written Snowflake queries.

Improved Data Understanding:

Enabled non-technical users to see data flows and understand business metric calculations
without needing to consult the engineering team.

Streamlined Data Operations:

The Seemore Data dashboard allowed for real-time insights into workflows, significantly
reducing the time required to identify and resolve inefficiencies.

Smoother Data Team Onboarding:

New data team members gain a better understanding of our data pipelines as it is easy to understand data flows using Seemore Data and optimize them thanks to the insights it provides.

Extending Usage to Business Stakeholders

Artlist plans to expand the use of Seemore Data beyond the analytics team to include business
stakeholders. This will allow stakeholders to understand data constructions and their impacts on costs, facilitating better decision-making and prioritization of tasks.

“If they understand that every change can significantly impact costs, then they will understand why we do some pushbacks to requirements they ask us to do. If they have visibility of the cost and understand the work and effort required, it might ease the negotiation around the priorities of tasks.”
Hannan Kravitz, Data Engineering Team Lead

The integration of Seemore Data has proven to be a game-changer for Artlist, offering enhanced
data visibility, significant cost savings, and improved workflow efficiency. By continuing to leverage Seemore Data, Artlist is well-positioned to sustain its rapid growth while maintaining optimal data management practices.

Seemore case studies

70%

Yearly savings

10%

Saved from one query

30min

Data stack integration

Verbit

Ilanit Rapaport, Director of BI & Analysis

30%

Cost reduction

50%

Run-time reduction

$7,300

Instantly saved

Hannan Kravitz, Data Engineering Team Leader

$50K

a year saved

47.6%

warehouse cost cut

$11K

to save by BI DW downsizing

Dror Yosef, Chief Data Officer

Cut costs, gain control.

Optimize your data operations with Seemore.

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