Configure Lineage¶
Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation
Configuring lineage in Alation involves the following steps:
Fetch dbt Projects/Environments and Map Datasources¶
To fetch dbt projects/environments, perform these steps:
Open Lineage Settings in your dbt Gen2 data source.
Go to the Lineage Configuration tab
Click Run to fetch all Alation data sources that match with projects/environments present in dbt.
The retrieved list of projects/environments appears in the Lineage extracted sources table.
Run Lineage Extraction¶
Lineage extraction is based on your project selection during the Metadata Extraction configuration.
For models, Alation displays lineage of all related tables for that models and by default the first table from the list is selected and can be changed from the dropdown
Lineage extraction fetches lineage metadata from dbt and generates lineage between various sources and targets such as RDBMS tables, views, and columns.
To run lineage extraction, perform these steps:
Open Lineage Settings in your dbt Gen2 data source.
Go to the Lineage Configuration tab.
Click Run extraction.
You can schedule extraction depending on your requirements. Scheduling lineage extraction is similar to scheduling Metadata Extraction. For details, see the Schedule Extraction section of Metadata Extraction.
View the Lineage Job History¶
You can view the status of the extraction actions after you run the extraction or after Alation triggers the Lineage Extraction as per the schedule.
To view the status of extraction, go to Lineage Extraction > Lineage Job History on the Settings page of your dbt Gen2 data source. The Extraction job status table displays the status of project extraction and corresponding lineage extraction.
Click the View Details link to view a detailed report of lineage extraction. If there are errors, the Job errors table displays the error category, error message, and a hint (ways to resolve the issue). Follow the instructions under the Hints column to resolve the error.
In some cases, Generate Error Report link is displayed above the Job errors table. Click the Generate Error Report link above the Job errors table to generate an archive (.zip) containing CSV files for different error categories, such as Data and Connection errors. Click Download Error Report to download the files.