Data Auditors: Monitoring Data Quality

OWB provides a way to create custom data auditors, which are processes that provide data monitoring by validating data against a set of data rules to determine which records comply and which do not. Data auditors gather statistical metrics on how well the data in a system complies with a rule by auditing and marking how many errors are occurring against the audited data. The monitoring process builds on your data profiling and data quality initiatives.

Data auditors have thresholds that allow you to create logic based on the fact that too many non-compliant records can divert the process flow into an error or notification stream. Based on this threshold, the process can choose actions. In addition, the audit results can be captured and stored for analysis purposes.
Data auditors can be deployed and executed ad-hoc, but they are typically run to monitor the quality of the data in an operational environment like a data warehouse or ERP system. Therefore, they can be added to a process flow and scheduled. When run, the data auditor sets several output values. One of these output values is called the audit result.

Data auditors also set the actual measured values such as Error Percent and Six Sigma values. Data auditors are a very important tool in ensuring that data quality levels are up to the standards set by the users of the system. It also helps determine spikes in bad data allowing events to the tied to these spikes.