Hi Domo Product Team, I’m reaching out as a Domo services partner and daily practitioner to share structured feedback on a recurring gap that impacts client trust in production dashboards. The issue arises when a column is removed or renamed in a DataSet that powers live cards. Domo correctly detects the broken reference, the card surfaces an error indicating the column no longer exists. However, there is no governance layer around this event, which creates three key problems:
- No pre-change dependency awareness
When a column is removed in a DataSet or ETL flow, there is no visibility into which cards, Beast Modes, or dashboard filters depend on it. The change is applied silently, and downstream assets break post-deployment. - No proactive notification to owners
Card owners are not alerted when their cards break. In practice, issues are discovered by business users rather than the platform, which creates avoidable operational friction. - Unsafe remediation workflow
While Domo correctly identifies the missing column in the editor, the card is considered “fixed” as soon as any column is dragged into place. This allows logically incorrect substitutions, creating a silent data integrity risk where a card renders but produces inaccurate results.
Recommendations:
- Introduce pre-change impact analysis at the DataSet level, surfacing all downstream dependencies before a column removal is committed.
- Add proactive notifications (in-app and email) to card and dataset owners when schema changes break dependencies.
- Provide column-level lineage visibility, showing which cards and Beast Modes reference each field.
- Implement guided column remapping, with suggested replacements based on name similarity and data type, instead of accepting arbitrary substitutions.
- Add a dashboard or admin-level health indicator to surface broken cards without requiring manual discovery.
Domo’s detection of broken references is solid; the foundation is there. What’s missing is the governance and control layer needed to safely manage schema changes in production environments. Happy to provide additional examples or walk through real scenarios if helpful.
Best,
Muhammad Shahbaz
+1(945) 527-2816
www.epoclabs.com
