With Omni and SYNQ, Dext Created Reliable Dashboards Used Across the Business

When Dext merged with another business, the data team saw it as an opportunity to rebuild. The old setup worked, but it wasn’t keeping up. Looker was falling behind, the models were getting increasingly messy, and the data team was relying only on basic dbt tests to know if the data was right.

“We wanted tools that each did one thing really well when we planned the revamp of our setup,” said Yordan Ivanov, Head of Data Engineering at Dext. “Omni gave us a modern, intuitive interface for dashboarding and exploration. SYNQ gave us confidence in the quality of the data.”

Together, they’ve helped Dext reshape their stack into something that’s clean, scalable, and trusted across the business.

Creating a cleaner semantic layer with Omni

The move from Looker to Omni wasn’t just about better UX. It was a chance to start fresh.

“We used the migration as an opportunity to sit down with stakeholders and reset,” said Yordan. “We found dashboards no one was using, metrics no one could explain, and cleaned things up. With 500 Looker dashboards, this was much needed.”

Omni’s YAML-based semantic layer gave the team more control, while the spreadsheet-like interface for calculations made it easier for finance and marketing teams to explore data on their own.

Full lineage across dbt and Omni, without maintaining exposures

Dext runs a two-project dbt setup: One focused on core data engineering, the other for BI models. This structure helps keep responsibilities clear, but made it difficult to track lineage across the full stack.

“With SYNQ, we can trace data from an Omni dashboard all the way back through both dbt projects to the raw source in Snowflake,” said Yordan. “We didn’t need to maintain a bunch of dbt exposures or force everything into one repo. It just works.”

This visibility has been a game-changer. Analysts and data engineers can quickly answer questions like: Where is this metric coming from? What breaks if I change this model? And when issues happen, they know exactly what’s impacted and who to notify.

“We used to spend an hour debugging each failure. Now it’s five minutes.”

Before SYNQ, most pipeline failures required digging through logs and Slack messages. Now, with dbt-native monitoring and full lineage across the stack, the team knows exactly where issues start and how to fix them.

“The moment something breaks, we get notified. In most cases, we’re the ones alerting the business, not the other way around.”

A year ago, nearly every dbt run had a failure. Today, failures are rare, and root cause analysis takes minutes, not hours.

“SYNQ was the only tool out there with a native integration with Omni. Combined with their deep integration with dbt, it was an easy choice when selecting our data observability platform.” 

Building data products with clear ownership

With a stronger foundation, Dext started organizing their most important data assets into formal data products such as Booking and Accounts, each with defined owners and monitoring.

“Finance is our biggest stakeholder, so we focused there first. Everything that supports core finance reporting now lives in a well-defined product, monitored by SYNQ. As we continue rolling out Omni, we plan on adding key dashboards as data products to automatically have these monitored by SYNQ.”

They’re also using SYNQ’s lineage and field usage tracking to experiment with schema-level data contracts. These are validated at the PR stage, catching breaking changes before they’re deployed.

What’s next with Omni and SYNQ

Dext is rolling out Scout, SYNQ’s AI-powered assistant for test generation and debugging, and embedding SYNQ status badges across all key dashboards.

“We’re excited about Scout. The faster we understand what broke, the more time we can spend improving the product.”

They’re also leaning into Omni’s AI capabilities on top of the semantic layer to enable more self-serve workflows, shifting analysts from ticket-resolvers to focusing on delivering on strategic projects.

“That's the shift,” said Yordan. “From support team to partner to the business. That’s what this stack is helping us do.”

‍