About Alation¶
Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation
Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation
Alation is an agentic data‑intelligence platform that brings cataloging, documentation, quality, governance, and data consumption together in a unified environment. It combines AI‑driven automation with collaborative human curation to transform raw metadata into a connected knowledge layer so people can manage trusted data and make informed data-driven decisions. By integrating automated workflows, generative AI, and human expertise, Alation helps organizations build, manage, and accelerate data initiatives at enterprise scale.
Who Uses Alation?¶
Alation is designed for a broad range of personas across the data lifecycle:
Data engineers, analysts, and data scientists manage pipelines, migrations, and the data architecture. They use database connectors and the Compose SQL editor to query diverse data sources, analyze lineage, perform impact analysis, and build reusable data products. APIs and integration capabilities let engineers embed catalog operations into CI/CD pipelines and automate metadata extraction.
Data stewards and governance professionals define policies, manage metadata quality, and ensure compliance. Alation’s Data Governance App provides a Policy Center, Workflow Center, Stewardship Workbench, and Governance Dashboard for bulk curation, policy management, and monitoring. Stewards use the Data Quality tools and the Critical Data Elements (CDE) Manager to maintain data health and document evidence for audits.
Compliance and risk officers ensure regulatory requirements are met. They leverage the privacy, risk, and compliance solution to discover personal data, apply policies, monitor adherence, and produce audit trails.
Business users and executives need trustworthy answers quickly. They ask questions in natural language, browse certified data products in the Marketplace, and rely on trust flags and policies to ensure data is safe to use. Executives monitor program adoption and return on investment through Alation Analytics data.
AI application developers build AI‑assisted and data‑driven applications. They create custom agents in Agent Studio, grounding them in catalog metadata and data products to solve specific business problems. Developers integrate Alation’s APIs into their applications to fetch metadata, policies, and lineage and use AI governance tools to document models, enforce policies, and track usage.
Principal Alation Components¶
The platform comprises several core components, each providing essential capabilities:
The Data Catalog¶
The Alation data catalog is a comprehensive inventory of all your enterprise data from multiple data storage sources, including databases, file systems, business intelligence or data visualization tools, and others, together with curated content generated by machine learning in the data catalog and manually by your data stewards.
The Alation data catalog is populated and maintained using an iterative five-step cycle, as follows:
Build the foundation using metadata extraction (MDE). This process uses the database’s own metadata to build the basic structure of the catalog. For example, for a database source, MDE extracts schema names, table and column names, and column data types.
Obtain automated insight with query log ingestion (QLI). This process goes through past activity to identify usage information, popularity, and the initial set of queries, joins, and filters.
Human-guided machine learning refines the catalog further. For example, Alation’s Lexicon suggests business-friendly titles for technical metadata and terms for the glossary. Human curators can confirm the suggestions and quickly improve the quality of the data catalog.
Data stewards provide depth and richness to the catalog by adding information such as descriptions, custom metadata, and other documentation reflecting domain knowledge and business context for the data assets.
Users complete the cycle, as the key to an effective data culture is for users to be able to make data driven decisions using trusted data. As data objects are discovered, used, and more thoroughly curated, the catalog becomes a richer experience—the better it gets, the more it is used, and the more it is used, the better it gets.
Each data object in the data catalog has its own catalog page. Catalog pages help you understand the data by providing descriptions and information on the popularity, health, and overall trustworthiness of the data. Your users can contribute to the curation effort by asking questions of your data experts through Conversations.
Once your data is visible in the data catalog, users across your enterprise can more easily find appropriate data and use it to improve your business decision-making. Alation’s powerful search capabilities combine with the curated knowledge to guide users to the most commonly used and most trusted data. This improves worker productivity and speeds user onboarding. Alation empowers analysts to find, understand, and share data for faster, more accurate insights.
Connectors¶
Alation includes an open, extensible connector framework and SDK to connect to more than 120 data sources, BI platforms, and SaaS applications. Organizations can build their own connectors to ingest metadata, query logs, and lineage.
Integrations¶
Alation’s integration capabilities help bring the power of the data catalog to your existing tool set. The initial offerings in Alation Anywhere integrate the Alation data catalog into Tableau and Slack.
Alation provides a set of robust REST APIs which allow the flexible integration of bi-directional data and metadata between the catalog and data and information sources in your enterprise.
Data Governance App¶
Data governance is a broad term describing how an organization manages its data assets, ensuring that those assets are of the highest possible quality, available as needed for the lifecycle of the assets, and controlled according to established processes that ensure support of the organization’s objectives.
The Alation Data Governance application provides tools that support your enterprise goal of fully compliant data. This includes protecting against unintended exposure of personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), or personal credit information (PCI). The app includes the ability to create and manage workflows, and tools for bulk data curation that allows related changes to be propagated to all relevant data objects.
Data Documentation Tools¶
Document Hubs allow organizations to create custom documentation types (policies, procedures, technical specifications, business terms) and group them into multiple hubs. A built‑in, customizable Glossary Hub provides definitions of business terms. Each document hub appears as a top‑level item in the catalog’s navigation and supports nested folders and documents.
Alation Analytics¶
Alation Analytics is a solution to provide data analysts and data stewards with the catalog usage information that describes how users are interacting with the data catalog. It reveals information on usage intensity and usage patterns, which can help inform prioritization of curation and stewardship activities.
Data Analytics¶
Alation provides a number of tools to help analysts work with catalog sources, including:
Compose—a full-featured SQL editor.
Lineage—graphs and views that visualize how target data objects are created from source data objects.
Trust check flags—display warnings about data issues visible to the analyst at the moment the data is being used.
Compose provides a powerful query tool to most relational database management systems supported by Alation, including Snowflake, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and more. As you build your queries, Alation provides suggestions to help guide you toward the most trusted data sources and away from deprecated data sources. Compose also includes the ability to reuse code snippets, create query forms, schedule queries, collaborate with other users to develop queries, and view and use the query history.
Lineage data answers the questions “Where does this data come?” and “Can I trust it?” It is compiled from data source metadata, query logs, Compose queries, and data posted over Alation’s public APIs. Lineage can also be created manually. This data is then visually represented as a diagram on the Lineage tab of a data source’s catalog page.
Data Products App¶
Data Products and Marketplace application provides a structured approach to managing and consuming data. It distinguishes data assets (tables, files, APIs, streams) and data products (reusable, governed listings of data assets). The Data Products Marketplace is a central location where producers publish data products and consumers discover them. Publishing enforces standards and ensures products are certified and compliant before they become available.
Data Quality App¶
Data Quality application is an AI‑powered solution that delivers enterprise‑grade monitoring and management of critical data assets. It continuously validates completeness, validity, accuracy, and freshness across your ecosystem, providing actionable insights and integrating quality information into the catalog. The app supports use cases such as regulatory compliance, business‑intelligence reliability and SLA monitoring and allows stewards, analysts, and administrators to govern quality rules, view quality signals in context and configure monitors.
Critical Data Elements Manager¶
Critical Data Elements Manager (CDE Manager) is an AI‑powered solution that aligns business, risk, and data teams around the data that matters most. It translates the language of risk and compliance into measurable standards, semantically maps critical data elements across the data ecosystem, and automatically monitors compliance. The system connects policies, glossary terms, and lineage to create a single, audit‑ready view of each CDE’s health and ownership, turning governance into a continuous cycle of alignment and accountability.
Agent Studio¶
Agent Studio is a development environment for building custom AI agents. Using a software‑development kit and templates, developers can create agents grounded in Alation’s metadata and data products, incorporate generative AI for summarization or reasoning, and embed governance controls from the start.
APIs¶
For programmatic access to Alation, see the rich set of public APIs on the Alation Developer Portal.
Why Is the Alation Data Platform Unique?¶
The Alation data platform is unique in that it was designed with these central properties in mind:
Intelligence informs every aspect of the Alation platform, from the combination of machine learning and human brilliance that drives Alation’s data catalog to the SmartSuggestions generated by the Compose app while you construct a data query.
Collaboration is enabled and encouraged at every stage of catalog construction, curation and stewardship, and query creation and publication.
Guided navigation uses a combination of machine learning and human curation to provide clear guidance as to the most appropriate and trusted information in the data catalog, including data assets, reusable queries, glossary terms, and more. This includes the ability to surface compliance policies at the point of use, empowering people to analyze and use data appropriately.
Active governance ensures that data is used consistently and in compliance with all required policies.
Broad, deep connectivity provides the tools to manage a wide variety of data sources from familiar relational database management systems, to business intelligence servers, file systems, and more.