Welcome to our 30-day success guide for onboarding Fivetran at your organization! You completed your Free Trial, but you’ve only just scratched the surface of what you can accomplish with automated data movement. 

In this blog post, we’ll provide tangible tips to maximize your success over the next 30 days and increase your impact using Fivetran. From creating an implementation plan to forecasting usage, each step will help you cover your bases and become a data automation whiz in no-time. 

Let's dive in!

Goal 1: Plan the path to success

Often, engineers and analysts have a backlog of projects and requests from stakeholders across the company. Having a clear plan in place will help you achieve your goals, provide visibility into your priorities and maximize your impact in the short and long-term. 

Create an implementation plan and focus on priorities

Start with an implementation plan! We’ve created this simple template that should help you map your integrations and move forward with a plan.

Here’s how to use it: 

1. Meet with your project and executive stakeholders to discuss immediate and long-term data priorities for the business.
2. Write down business goals and map out which sources you need to connect to reach them. 
3. Include estimated timelines for each project, who is responsible and identify security, legal and compliance dependencies.
4. Review with your stakeholders to ensure you’re aligned on priorities and next steps.
5. Continue to update your plan as you move forward!

This will give you structure and peace-of-mind, and provide your wider team with visibility into your plan-of-action and progress.

💡DID YOU KNOW: If Fivetran doesn’t have your native source, you can request it! We can build a fully-managed, lightweight “Lite Connector” for you in as soon as 30 days.

💡PRO TIP: You get 14 days free for any new connector! This includes a free historical sync and a usage estimate 7 days into your trial period. 

Get and share advice in Fivetran Community

You’re not alone in your journey towards a modern data stack! Community is a great way to learn from others and pay it forward. Try introducing yourself, asking a question or sharing how you’re using Fivetran!

With professionals from across the data maturity curve (including Fivetran team members) it serves as your town square for all things data. 

Goal 2: Connect high-priority sources

With a plan in place, you’re ready to start connecting high-priority sources that bring impact to your business. Continue using your implementation plan as a checklist to help you manage your 14-day free trials and maximize success.

Why do we have 14-day free trials for new connectors? We want to make sure you feel confident and worry-free setting up your sources without risking unintended costs in the process. Experiment and see the results of easy, automated data movement first — before locking in your full infrastructure. 

💡PRO TIP: Looking to show value as quickly as possible? Try connecting 3 unique data sources in your first 30 days. Why? This is where the magic happens: your team can leverage fresh data that’s blended from multiple sources — without the manual, static, ad hoc reporting that eats up time!

Follow these steps to run a free 14-day connector trial:

Depending on the data source, it’s possible you need permission from legal, security or data owners to get started. Use one of these templates to get the conversation started.

1. Add a connector.
2. Start your free, initial sync. Once the sync completes, your free 14-day connector trial begins!
3. Go check how the data has landed in your destination! This is the exciting part! We’ve normalized your data and created thoughtful Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs), making it easy for you to query right away. Check out our ERD for Shopify, for example.
4. Adjust your sync frequency.
5. Transform your data in clicks. All powered by our integration with dbt Core^TM*, our Quickstart data models give you model-ready data in seconds. If you already have a dbt project, we have dozens of available models to help you accelerate your workflow.
6. Create data visualizations or automations. Data on its own is just data. You need to create new reports or dashboards so your team can derive insights, or automate processes from regularly synced data so your business maximizes value.
7. Understand your pricing estimate. Seven days after the initial sync for any new connector, you’ll get a usage and pricing estimate. Review with your stakeholders, pause any irrelevant tables, then discuss positive business outcomes and next steps.
8. Review free trial settings. On the connector page, you can view when your free use ends and when we’ll provide a usage estimate. After the free trial period ends, your connector will remain on and you’ll automatically begin to pay for usage unless you change this setting. You can always pause or unpause connectors later.

Share progress with stakeholders

It’s important to keep stakeholders in the loop when you’ve added new sources. Ensure they are aware and getting value out of newly synced data. 

Discuss questions such as: 

• How are you using the data so far?
• What would happen if you didn’t have this data?
• Is there any data you don’t need? (You can block schemas or tables that aren’t bringing value).
• Is there data we don’t have from missing sources that would bring value to your team and our business?

Use these pre-written emails and slack announcements to help inform and involve your teammates:

• Templates for engaging marketing stakeholders
• Templates for engaging sales stakeholders
• Template for engaging finance stakeholders
• Templates for engaging legal, security, and compliance stakeholders

Goal 3: Become an expert in your usage and pipeline activity

Now, let’s focus on fundamentals of usage, alerts and monitoring. 

How to understand your usage

As a quick refresher, you only pay for what you use each month. 

Instead of total rows, your usage is based on monthly active rows (MAR). 

What are MAR?

MAR are primary keys that are added, updated or deleted from your source in your destination by our connectors.

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Once a row is active, it is only counted once per month. So even if that row updates a million times that month, it’s still one MAR. This is why MAR is often highest the first few days of the month but then tapers off.

Learn more: Why MAR is a better measure of value than total rows. 

You can view your usage and total spend each month on your usage page. There, you can drill down further into your usage: where it increased, decreased, top sources for MAR and more.

Set up usage and spend alerts

Similar to a credit card, you can set up alerts if your spend exceeds a threshold in Fivetran! If you have a strict budget, set up alerts on your billing page. 

We recommend setting this to 75%-90% of your comfortable limit, so you get notified before exceeding it. For example, if your budget is $400, set your alert threshold between $300 and $360.

Achieve seamless monitoring with Fivetran’s free Log Connector

If you haven’t added Fivetran’s Log Connector yet, you’re missing out! It provides visibility into your Fivetran pipelines and usage for anyone who needs it in your business intelligence (BI) tool. Plus, it’s free and super quick to set-up, so it’s a no-brainer!

Get out-of-the-box Fivetran reporting in 4 easy steps:

1. Add Fivetran’s Log Connector
2. Transform in a few clicks (Learn how here) 
3. Your Fivetran Log data – including sync statistics, user activities on each connector, instance performance and monthly active row usage – will then land in your destination. Check out the ERD here.
4. Create visualizations in your BI tool for any end user or business stakeholder to view. 

🧠 Get inspired! Learn how Fivetran uses Fivetran’s Log Connector in-house! : 

Optimize and forecast your usage

Do you want to forecast how increased usage impacts your overall monthly costs before you add new sources? Or maybe after you’ve added valuable sources, and now your total usage exceeds your budget. In that case, consider turning off tables that aren’t adding value to your business. Simulate your monthly pricing with different volumes of usage in your usage estimator without impacting your setup or billing.

In the example below, we’re forecasting “planned monthly costs” for potential additional usage. 

When your usage estimates for new connectors are available, this will change your planned monthly cost, helping you get a full view on how new connectors will impact your monthly billing and usage before making a decision.

Learn more: 6 tips to understand, forecast, and optimize your usage

Goal 4: reach pro-level status!

Share pipeline workload & management  

Now that you’ve mastered the basics of your Fivetran account, you’re ready to invite your coworkers to help field new connector requests across the business. By sharing pipeline management with teams outside the data org, you democratize data access and break down bottlenecks to accelerate time-to-insights.

You can easily invite new users with role-based access, ensuring tight governance at the top of your pipeline. 

Here are a few ways to get your coworkers up and running:

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1. Introduce Fivetran. Use this customizable template, or if you already have a communication plan in place, send over this quick overview.
2. Read about the types of roles and permissions in Fivetran.
3. Invite your team members and assign role-based access to your account, destination(s) and connectors.

For Enterprise & Business Critical plan holders with strict governance requirements, we recommend using SCIM provisioning to manage user accounts with ease and enforce higher password requirements.

👍 Need to onboard users at scale? Click here to learn how. 

Promote a data-driven culture

Your last step in these first 30 days should focus on democratizing data within your organization. 

If you haven’t already, it’s time to develop user-friendly dashboards, reports and visualizations to empower non-technical users to explore and derive insights from your data. Share them with your teams and present new reporting regularly on team meetings.

Here are a few examples of how Fivetran promotes data literacy and awareness internally:

Tip 1: Announce new reports on public channels: Fivetran has an analytics announcement channel, where we regularly post about new data, dashboards and reports (and celebrate each other! 🎉)

Tip 2: Do lightweight training: Present new data to impacted teams. For example, Fivetran analysts present and demo any new marketing dashboards during our bi-weekly marketing meetings.

Tip 3: Make dashboard reviews a ritual: We review key company ORKs and dashboards on every all-hands meeting. Not only does this drive awareness, it helps listeners with varying degrees of data literacy understand how to read new reports.

Begin exploring your databases

Your databases contain the heart of how your business runs. Product and transactional data from your databases makes analytics reporting across the board more meaningful. But how do you get started? We recommend reading database documentation, starting conversations with internal stakeholders like your database owners or database architect and socializing our trust center with your data security champions. 

Already have your database connected? Read our seven essential database schema best practices.

Next steps

Congratulations! By completing this guide, you’ve built a solid foundation for efficient data movement, transformation and democratization within your organization. Now it’s time to think about questions like: how is this data providing value? How is our business changing? Remember, continuous improvement is key, so regularly review your implementation plan and priorities so you can adapt to changing business needs.

🌟Impact the community: What did you think of this guide? What did your team do that was successful? Share in Community so we can all learn together and improve!