Collibra Governance Pros and Cons

Collibra is very good at talking to modern database systems like a normal RDBMS, a DB2, or a SQL server or an Oracle.

In terms of data governance, as I mentioned, it can be a one-stop solution for all of your data governance needs.

I like the lineage feature the most because I don't think there's any other tool that actually depicts the data flow from multiple sources and the connectivities between every data element inside those sources.

It's not a complicated product.

The catalog feature is definitely valuable because it makes ingesting the metadata of any application quite simple. You don't have to do things manually. You can just schedule an import, and it will just refresh the metadata of whatever application you want. That's what I like. I usually work on the technical side, and other than that, I usually create integrations. I integrate Collibra with different environments or applications. I'm a developer, so I cannot vouch for the business, but for me, it is quite developer-friendly with the Java API interface and the REST API interface that they have provided. It is good for creating dashboards based on the needs of each and every role. It can be user-specific or group-specific. We usually create dashboards and give them to our business users, and they are quite happy with that.

The end-to-end solution itself is great. The most valuable is the workload feature that Collibra offers. There is a vast amount of flexibility in terms of how much we can customize. It gives us a lot of options to implement for a lot of purposes.

The automation process is very strong.

From the perspective of a data user, the solution has a great search capability.

The ability to collaborate and approve business terms for the business glossary data dictionary is excellent.

It's a user-friendly tool, even for non-technical people.

Where it isn't great is on older technologies that you'll typically find in finance or insurance industries, such as older types of data with VSAM or ISAM, or those types of older technologies. It just doesn't connect with them very easily.

Recently, I find that the default process of issue management in Collibra is really complex — It wasn't really helpful to us.

The connectors are not very sophisticated. They can do, for example, Informatica and Tableau, but the connectors themselves could be improved.

While connecting with the data source, it's not very easy. If there's a firewall, it is difficult to connect with the database. It's not easy when you are configuring on the database.

It should have more integrations with things like CyberArk because its main purpose is GDPR implementation. We have to have more scope for things that implement more privacy. CyberArk makes sure your credentials are vaulted and your things are secure when you're creating your integrations or connecting to an application. I do believe that they are working on this feature.

One problem is the data lineage, especially extracting the ETL transformation from different ETL tools and identifying how the data is getting changed from one layer to different layers and how the transformation is applied. It doesn't support all the ETL tools for extracting the transformation logic. It supports some of the tools, but there are still some tools that need to be supported. There is also a small pain point in terms of integration. There is a little bit of change in their strategy from Collibra's end. Earlier, they used to offer two solutions. One was out of the box, and one was a custom-built solution for which they used to provide a dual connector. Now the focus from the Collibra side is more on using the out of the box connector. They are discouraging doing the custom integration. That leaves us with two problems. The first problem is that the out-of-the-box connecter is not yet enabled for a lot of systems, and the second problem is that the out-of-the-box connecter has certain limitations. If we want to tweak those as per our needs, it is not possible. However, the custom-built is still supported, and you can still build a custom integration by using the API, but it is not very encouraged by Collibra. Its dashboard also needs to be improved. There are options to use the HTML code to customize your dashboard, but it has a lot of limitations.

Sometimes, if a client needs a specific customization, we cannot do it directly. The client needs to reach out to Collibra and request the customization.

No easy way to connect to different data sources.

The connectors for metadata ingestion need to be improved.

Occasionally we get little bugs that occur, however, this is typical.