What needs improvement with SnapLogic?

My company has a licensed version of SnapLogic, so we have to pay for the product when we use it in our organization. Pentaho and Talend are ETL tools that allow my company to migrate the data within a fraction of a second using open-source products, not the paid version. In SnapLogic, my company uses the product's paid version, so we have to pay for license charges. When compared with other tools, SnapLogic needs to be given a trial version or made available as an open-source product for simple migrations, which can be helpful for many users. In Talend and Pentaho, users can migrate data by just installing the software. I just installed the UI. SnapLogic doesn't provide any on-premises software, so users have only cloud-based software to use. Just giving the email address and creating a password is enough to configure SnapLogic. Tools like Talend and Pentaho need their users to indulge in manual installation since both tools fall under the on-premises software category. That is what is actually called on-premises software. It would be great if SnapLogic office separated software to manage small migrations.

I would like to see more performance-related dashboards, ones that display the cost of a pipeline, for instance. Also, it would be helpful to have management dashboards for overseeing pipelines and connections.

They should expand in terms of features for SaaS-based market requirements in different sectors similar to Dell Bumi, AbLogic, Azure, Google, Oracle, etc. There could be more AI capabilities included in the product.

SnapLogic should have some inbuilt protocol mechanism in order to speed up. Each snap is expensive if requested on a one-off basis; however, it may be wiser not to opt for a review unless absolutely necessary. In such cases, there is no need to pay for the review.

I am looking for more scheduling options. When it comes to scheduling, there are different tools in the market.

The solution could improve its API management.

Ultra Pipelines is great in terms of real-time ingestion and real-time jobs but it needs some adjustment. Also, you get the application and enough sources but they don't really ask the correct questions on how to handle the resources and provide the correct information to our team in order to avoid any system problems. We've been seeing some latencies now and then due to the nodes that we currently have available, and due to the lack of knowledge on our SnapLogic Pipelines. In addition, there are snaps we don't need but that affect the latency of the work and I'd like to see some training videos so our developers can have the best practices on how SnapLogic should be used.

What could be improved in SnapLogic is that it was not capable in terms of processing a large number of datasets, but at that point, SnapLogic was evolving. It didn't give a lot of Snaps. I heard recently there are a lot of Snaps getting added and the solution was being enhanced, particularly to connect different data sources. When I was working with SnapLogic six months to one year back, I faced the issue of it not being capable of handling a huge volume of datasets or didn't have much of Snaps, and that was the drawback. If there is any large number of data sets, that's based on or depends on your configuration. If it is a huge volume of data, other traditional ETL tools such as Informatica and Talend can process millions and billions of records, while in SnapLogic, the Snaplex fails or it returns an error in terms of processing that huge volume of data. Informatica, Talend, or any other ETL tool can run for hours in terms of jobs, while SnapLogic jobs fail when the threshold is reached. SnapLogic isn't able to withstand processing, but I don't know if that's still an issue at present, because the solution is getting enhanced and it's been more than six months to one year since I last worked with SnapLogic. There are now a lot of Snaps getting added to the solution, and if it can overcome the limitations I mentioned, SnapLogic could be the go-to tool because currently, it's not being used as much in organizations. It's being used comparatively less compared to other retail tools.

Right now, they have reduced their window period. You will have periodical upgrades from them. Previously, the application used to be down for a while. If you have any real-time pipelines, you need a bridge which is a little costlier solution. You'd need to have a separate server for batching, due to these issues. Otherwise, it'll go down. Your scheduler, you can rerun it, however, in real-time, your business cannot wait. That means you'll maintain a separate server. However, they have reduced this significantly, with downtime down to 15 minutes from two hours. However, if they could further reduce it, that would still be better. We'd like zero downtime in the future. In the past two years, we have seen tremendous growth. We expect very good things in the near future. They, however, do not have their own cloud platform for their iPaaS in the same way AWS or Azure does.

There is room for improvement of API management and the dashboard for task execution. However, they have made some nice improvements in that regard recently. Allowing external services to connect to API management would be great as well.

We'd like there to be more ways for users to get more comfortable and have more experience with the solution to make it easier to use. It would help with referring issues, for example. When we get error messages, I'd like them to be more simplified and easier to understand.

One area for improvement in SnapLogic is the transparency in the flow of data. It needs to have more transparency. Right now, users only have a preview option at the end of any job flow, so at the end of any Snap Pack, there is a data preview option that lets you review the data and see how it's moving. What would make the solution better is more debugging and more access to change data from the preview panel or more functionality in terms of the preview option. What I'd like to see in the next release of SnapLogic is better debugging of errors. Another feature I'd like to see in the solution is a more in-depth data preview because currently, it just shows you what happened to the data, rather than giving you a preview of how the data gets transformed.

One of the areas for improvement in SnapLogic is that the connectors for some of the applications should be more available in terms of testing in the dev environment. Another area for improvement is that the logging should be standardized, for example, the integration with an ELK stack should be required out-of-the-box, so you can ship the log and have it in the ELK stack. There should be integration with ELK stack for the log shipping. An additional feature I'd like to see in SnapLogic is the functionality of building streaming applications, for example the Pub/Sub model. SnapLogic currently supports Kafka and other streaming applications, but there's more focus on building streaming pipelines now, so if that feature is there, it'll be very helpful.

The API monitoring could still be improved upon. The dashboards regarding scheduled tasks need further improvement. It's not user-friendly. If you want to find out which task was executed, you have no good dashboards for monitoring. There are no user-friendly charts where you can check which API was called, and how many times or if there was a peak of requests to a certain API.

The stability can be improved. The problem with Snaplogic is convincing the management. SnapLogic is a technical product, which could be the reason that convincing the management is so difficult. High-volume integration and the number of dependencies should be lower. The EPA requires a lot of customization. Many other solutions are programming-oriented, which require a lot of customization. The support is the most important improvement they could make. In the next release, I would like better support, more online tutorials, online certification courses, and better marketing to help, geared to large businesses and showing them how this solution can meet their requirements. Also, more integration would be helpful.

The solution isn't ideal for complex processing or logic. We use another solution for that. I'm not sure if this solution can integrate with Docker, but if it can't they should work to make this possible as Docker makes it easy to get huge amounts of data and has very good policies.