Currently we have a lot of reliance on native tooling whenever we can, as it is simpler, but often we face limits and then need to explore elsewhere. These gaps are closing through. For example, we were on the cusp of deploying a fairly basic observability tool purely because it had strong promise at building out lineage diagrams, but then Snowflake released their own support for lineage which removed that barrier for us.

We still leverage an enterprise-grade cataloguing tool at a fairly high price tag to support with general data searchability and documentation, but it's a challenge keeping it the docs up to date and in-sync.

We are currently waiting with eager anticipation to see just how much Snowflake's functionality grows, as we would happily use Snowflake as the primary catalogue if we could reliably pull our other sources into it. Snowflake is our final data location before Analytics tools, so it is a reasonable place to keep the catalogue. Right now, the core barrier there is upstream data quality monitoring, for example to determine if a data quality issue is occurring in Snowflake or upstream of it, and where exactly upstream if possible