FAQ

Product

What is Locale?

Locale.ai is a no-code control tower that serves as your ops observability & actionability platform.With Locale you can:
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‍Get Alerts As Soon As Something Breaks - Instead of discovering it hours or days later. Locale constantly monitors your data and flags the most important issue.

‍Prioritize Your Most Important Issues - Assign issues to your team and create accountability. Ensure quick issue resolution and escalation if not solved.

‍Ensure No Issue Goes Unnoticed Ever - Make sure every issue gets acted upon via automation and notifications on Email, Slack Webhooks, Whatsapp and more!

Does Locale offer any predictive analytics?

Locale does not currently offer predictive analytics.We believe that predictive models are a company’s core IP and that they should be built in-house.

It is also very hard to build these models in a productized way since they need to accommodate your own context. Instead, we have the capability of SQL queries so you can use them to make your queries intelligent.

How does Locale work?

You can get started with Locale and set up your first alert within 15 minutes.

‍All you have to do is connect your data sources and configure your tables and monitor your business events with simple rules in SQL. In addition, you can manage your incidents, and resolve and escalate issues with your team members!

Sign up here!

What kind of companies should use Locale?

Locale helps companies solve the problem of making sure that their operations are running smoothly by constantly monitoring your data and flagging the most important issues. It empowers operations teams to automate their critical business workflows with alerts and be proactive about keeping track of what's happening across their organization.

Some common industries that find value in Locale are Mobility, On-Demand Delivery, Scheduled Delivery, Long-Haul Logistics, E-commerce and Fintech. If you don’t find your industry listed here, mail us at aditisinha@locale.ai.

Do we have to know how to write SQL to use Locale?

Yes, you do! In order to take full advantage of the Locale platform and all its features, including alerts, you need to know some basic SQL.

SQL is the most popular and easy-to-learn language used to query databases. With this language under your tool belt, you will be able to build critical data workflows needed to hit their operational goals.

Does Locale offer on-premise solutions?

Locale has always been 100% self-managed SaaS, accessible via a simple URL. We are not on-premise because we are designed to benefit from the scale and efficiency that only the cloud provides.

Privacy

Is Locale secure?

We take security very seriously, and we have a team of experts who work hard to make sure that all of your data is safe, secure, and encrypted. Locale is fully compliant with major data compliances.

What are the data security practices in place?

Locale follows strict data security practices which include encryption of data at both - Rest and Transit with SSE-S3. Apart from this, there is a continuous audit of encryption key usage and the RDS used by Locale is also encrypted at rest.

Does Locale need any sort of personally identifiable information?

No, there is no need to push any sort of personally identifiable information. Locale works well with synthetically generated IDs.

Is Locale GDPR compliant?

Yes, Locale is GDPR compliant.

Integrations

How can we integrate with Locale?

Here’s how you can integrate with Locale:

👉 Step 1: Navigate to the Data connections section, and click on the “Add new data source” button.

👉 Step 2: You’ll find a list of data warehouses that Locale supports currently(more to be added soon!), click on the one in which your databases are stored.

‍👉 Step 3: Provide the necessary credentials for Locale to connect with your database/schemas.

‍👉 Step 4: Click on Test Connection.

Does Locale have any scale limitations

Locale is the perfect solution for a company looking to scale their alerting capabilities. There are no scale limitations from Locale's side—we scale horizontally according to your needs, and can scale to hundreds of alerts easily. Users can leverage the power of their underlying database and optimise queries accordingly.

Locale is built in such a way that you can integrate multiple data connections, which enables users to connect multiple databases and utilise them with their respective data boundaries without having to move data around.

How fast can I get to value with Locale?

Locale is designed to give you immediate value. We can connect to your cloud data warehouse (CDW) tables in seconds and do not require data modelling to query the CDW.

So within 15 minutes, we often see new customers running queries on live data and setting up their alerts.

What data warehouses does Locale currently support?

Currently, Locale supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, RedShift, Big Query, Snowflake and many more! If you can’t find what you are looking for, submit a request for a connection you’d like to see added to Locale here and we’ll get back to you!

Comparisons

How is Locale better than Tableau or other BI tools like Looker and Metabase?

Locale is different from Tableau, Metabase, and other BI tools in a few ways. First, BI tools are generic and not built for your industry or ops, making them less relevant to you as an organization. They also have simple threshold-based alerts that are spammy—this just becomes noise for your users. Moreover, there is no way to understand if a notification or an alert is being acted upon.

With Locale, we stand above the rest of these tools for our actionability. We track every alert from when it was created to when it was resolved along with an escalation that ensures alerts get acted upon. We also have a command centre panel where you get full visibility on how many alerts were created for which issue, which alerts got actioned, how long it took to action and so on.

Why is Locale needed when companies have internal dashboards?

Engineering teams build and maintain internal dashboards which is a huge cost to a company. Moreover, the dependency on the engineering team to create new metrics for analysis makes the entire process much slower. Typically, companies take 60-75 days to create a single metric and this involves 5 different teams including data, operations, and engineering teams. Even after this, internal dashboards only solve for access to metrics while collaboration, taking the decision, and measuring impact is missing.

Here is a comparison chart for reference:

How is Locale better than Kepler?

In any decision-making process, there are 5 steps involved - creating metrics, debugging the problem, collaborating on top of it, making the decision, and measuring its impact. Kepler only allows operations teams to create a metric and debug the problem. However, with Locale, teams can also collaborate, take decisions and measure impact.

Kepler doesn’t have real-time capabilities, while with Locale’s incident response, your teams can respond to problems and bottlenecks in real time as they occur. Another reason why Kepler is not suited for high growth companies is that Kepler is not scalable. It needs the teams to manually upload data every time they want to look at something, while with Locale, there’s one-time integration only. Once a flow is set of the data, operations teams can come and use the product however they like. Here is a comparison chart for reference:

Why should we buy Locale instead of building another internal dashboard?

Locale offers a SaaS platform that you can install in less than 15 minutes (and we'll even help you set it up). It has got everything you need to run your business smoothly: notifications, triggers, workflows and integrations with other tools like Slack, Google Calendar etc.

Typically, alerts get built in-house via cron jobs and for very basic/minimal use cases. Any additional functionality depends on the engineering team's bandwidth. But this isn’t enough to cater to all your different use cases that you have across all verticals. You won’t even have a mechanism for tracking and accountability. It's a huge investment from your side, so Locale is more cost-efficient.

For a more detailed explanation and a thorough understanding of the product, visit our blog.

"The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge."

― Thomas Berger

Frequently Asked Questions