Altair Monarch (formerly Datawatch Monarch, acquired by Altair in December, 2018) works with both relational and multi-structured data including support for a wide range of formats including PDF, XML, HTML, text, spool and ASCII files. The product can access data from invoices, sales reports, balance sheets, customer lists, inventory, logs and more. According to the vendor, the system is easy to use, allowing users to quickly select any data source and automatically convert it into…
* Individual seat licenses are very expensive, which is one reason we are moving to CMOD/RMS. But RMS has less functionality than standalone Monarch (now known as "Modeler"). I would like to know what improvements we can expect in RMS, I would also ask, what is the future of the standalone version? * In the past there has been a dearth of user discussion and support in the online community, although this seems to be improving with the new "Datawatch Commmunity" (http://community.datawatch.com).
Setting up visualizations with time series data requires a good understanding of how the software works. I would like it to be more intuitive. Having said that, time series data is inherently complicated and I don't see any obvious ways to make it simpler. But I'm not a software designer myself; they could put more resources into the user experience.
Their video training is really helpful and they have a big library of videos, but the videos get out of date as they come out with new versions. I can imagine that it's difficult to keep all the videos updated, but it would be great if the videos were always using the latest major version of the product.
They need more visualizations. They have a pretty big collection now but it seems like there is often some other way to present and visually analyze data that would be a better/tighter fit with requirements than the visualizations available in the standard product. I understand it is possible to add more visualizations - custom visualizations - but that's beyond my expertise.
Datawatch recently repositioned Data Pump and essentially priced us out of the market. The initial investment was very inexpensive, but the yearly maintenance contract was viewed as being a little pricey. The only value of the contract was that it included software upgrades. The Professional Services portion of the contract that was meant to provide support was not viewed as being very effective or beneficial.
Datawatch is very good value of money compared to QlikView; QlikView is really more of a BI tool and has a lot of functions that I didn't need. Datawatch is very strong in the real-time area where Tableau, Panorama, and Qlik don't do very well. If you need to set up a visual monitoring dashboard, Datawatch is the best product I've seen for that. if you want to do a lot of in depth statistical analysis of large databases, Tableau is probably a good option.
