Avora vs. Outlier

The amount of data businesses are collecting is growing exponentially, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to monitor this data for any changes or incidents that could have a big impact on the business. Data teams try to stay on top of this, but there are so many ways that data can be split and analysed that it becomes an almost impossible task, and they have more important work to do for the business anyway.

For this reason, Data Teams are increasingly turning to data monitoring tools like Avora and Outlier to scan their data 24/7 for anomalies and changing trends so that business can be alerted and react as quickly as possible. 

But knowing which platform is best suited for your business can be difficult, and so we’ve put together this quick guide to compare the two tools.

Avora Outlier
Connecting Data
Cloud Data Warehouses ✅ ✅
Other platforms (e.g. Facebook) ❌ ✅
Self-serve ✅ ❌
Creating Metrics
Create in platform ✅ ❌
Create from external metrics layer ✅ ❌
Self-serve ✅ ❌
Monitoring Metrics
Monitor metrics ✅ ✅
Filter by dimensions ✅ ✅
Select specific dimension values ✅ ❌
Self-serve ✅ ❌
Alerts and Notifications
In-app ✅ ✅
Email ✅ ✅
Slack ✅ ❌
Teams ✅ ❌
Webhook ✅ ❌
Send alerts to specific channels ✅ ❌
Receive alerts as happen ✅ ✅
Receive alerts as reports ✅ ❌
Tweak the sensitivity of the algorithm ✅ ❌
Apply notification delays ✅ ❌
Pricing
Pay per dimension ❌ ✅
Pay per run ✅ ❌

Connecting Your Data

Whilst Avora and Outlier are both able to connect directly to your cloud data warehouse in order to monitor your data for hidden issues and opportunities, Avora is fully self-serve in that you can create an account and connect your data in minutes.

Creating Metrics

With Outlier, you specify what metrics you would like to track and their team builds them.

With Avora, you can create metrics directly in the tool itself. However, you will soon be able to reuse metrics created inside of a metrics layer such as dbt or Transform. This way, there is less work to do when setting up and you only ever have one source of truth for metrics across all of your BI tools.

Monitoring Your Metrics

Outlier

With Outlier, you inform the team which metrics and dimensions you want to monitor and they configure the monitoring on their side. It is not possible to select which values in a dimension to track, the system simply tracks everything.

Avora

With Avora, everything is self-serve. You select the metrics and dimensions you want to monitor directly in the tool. It is also possible to go one step further and select the specific values that you want to monitor, leaving out those that are not as important. The advantage here is that you don’t necessarily need to monitor all values in a dimension particularly if they are not that relevant for your use case, reducing the number of irrelevant alerts and ‘noise’.

Alerts and Notifications

Outlier

Receive alerts and notifications in-app or via email.

Avora

Receive alerts and notifications in-app, or via email, Slack and Microsoft Teams. Alternatively, you can also use Avora’s Webhooks API to receive alerts and notifications as JSON to display these alerts inside of any other tool. 

Also, Avora aims to reduce alert fatigue in the following ways:

  • Send specific alerts to specific people/teams or via specific channels. This way, only the relevant people are alerted to issues.
  • Specify whether you want to receive alerts for issues as they happen, or consolidated into hourly or daily reports in order to minimise noise.
  • Tweak the sensitivity of the anomaly detection algorithm to make it more or less sensitive, and customise this for metric you are tracking. 
  • Apply notification delays to avoid situations where false alerts are triggered because data is not in the warehouse yet.

Pricing

Outlier

With Outlier, you pay a set fee per dimension that you monitor, regardless of how many distinct values the dimension has.

Avora

Avora uses consumption based pricing, so you only pay for what you track. The less you track, the less you pay, and you can increase or decrease your consumption on a month to month basis. 

Click here to view Avora’s pricing.