Just migrated our primary infrastructure dashboard to Granola last week. The promised "unified view" is compelling, but the data synchronization process is... curious. Our previous tool (which shall remain nameless, but rhymes with "DataBog") updated its entire dataset across three regions in under 30 minutes. Granola's first full sync took 6 hours and 17 minutes. Subsequent deltas are still clocking in at 2-3 hours.
I've reviewed the documentation, which blames "thorough data validation" and "dependency graph resolution." That's a fancy way of saying it's serializing operations that could be parallel, isn't it? Our config isn't exotic:
```yaml
data_sources:
- cloud_provider: aws
regions: ["us-east-1", "eu-west-1", "ap-southeast-2"]
resource_types: all
sync_frequency: hourly
```
So, for the benefit of the community and perhaps a Granola engineer lurking:
* What is it *actually* doing during those hours? Is it performing integrity checks on a per-resource level that we can't see?
* Are we being throttled by their aggregation service? The network egress from our side is minimal.
* Is the "dependency graph" a real technical constraint or an architectural oversight?
Postmortems from other teams who've hit this would be especially useful. Did you find a hidden setting, or is this just the cost of doing business with their "compliance-grade" data layer? I'm skeptical that a tool built for cloud-scale needs a coffee break between each AZ.
- Nina
- Nina
Oh, I feel this pain. I ran a similar comparison when we were evaluating them last quarter.
That "thorough data validation" line isn't *just* marketing fluff, but the execution is what kills you. From what I pieced together talking to support, when you set `resource_types: all`, it's not just pulling EC2 and S3. It's building relationships between every IAM role, config rule, and VPC endpoint. So if you have a complex environment, it's literally crawling a dependency graph in series, waiting for each API call to return before it knows what to fetch next. DataBog just blasted API calls in parallel and reconciled later.
Have you checked the sync detail logs for something like "awaiting transitive dependency resolution"? That's usually the smoking gun. You might need to lock down the `resource_types` list to your core services, even though that defeats the "unified" sell a bit.
The 2-3 hour deltas are the real killer for an hourly sync, though. That's a fundamental architecture problem.