Intelligent Data Quality Monitoring

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Alation Data Quality provides enterprise-grade monitoring and management capabilities for your critical data assets. Available on Alation Cloud Service instances with the New User Experience, this AI-powered solution delivers actionable insights to data consumers while seamlessly integrating with your existing cataloged data sources.

Poor data quality undermines decision-making, regulatory compliance, and trust in data-driven initiatives. Alation Data Quality mitigates these risks through continuous validation of completeness, validity, accuracy, and freshness across your data ecosystem.

Hybrid Execution Model

You can choose how to execute your quality checks:

• Internal Scheduling: Use standard monitors to schedule checks and detect anomalies directly within Alation.

• External Execution (SDK): Use the Alation Data Quality SDK to run checks inside your data pipelines (e.g., Airflow, CI/CD).

To use the SDK, you must first create an SDK-Enabled Monitor in the Alation Data Quality application to define your checks. Then, you can use the Alation Data Quality SDK on PyPI to execute those checks programmatically in your external environment. For more details, see Alation Data Quality SDK Documentation.

Alation Data Quality will help your organization understand, configure, and monitor data assets effectively in the following use cases:

• Regulatory Compliance: Monitor data quality metrics required for financial reporting, GDPR compliance, and industry regulations.

• Business Intelligence Reliability: Validate data accuracy and consistency feeding into dashboards and analytics to ensure trustworthy insights.

• SLA Monitoring: Track data availability and quality metrics to meet service level agreements with internal and external stakeholders.

• Pipeline Data Gating: Enforce governed quality checks directly within ETL/ELT pipelines (via Airflow, CI/CD, etc.) to stop bad data from propagating.

Users can perform the following tasks using Alation Data Quality:

• Data Stewards: Govern data quality standards and remediation workflows.

• Data Analysts: Get data quality information as part of your data catalog’s information and assess data reliability before analysis.

• Data Engineers: Integrate governed quality checks into orchestration frameworks and data pipelines using the Alation Data Quality SDK.

• Catalog Administrators: Configure and maintain quality checks and monitors.

Use the following links to navigate and understand Alation Data Quality:

• Understanding Alation Data Quality Architecture

• Security Aspects of Data Quality Monitoring

• Access the Data Quality Features

• Supported Data Sources

• Data Quality Dashboard

• Alation Data Quality Standards and Library

• Manage Monitors

• Manage Checks

• Troubleshooting the Data Quality Features