Bots Overview

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

Bots enable organizations to maximize their data stewards’ time curating data assets to help others find, understand, and trust the data. Keeping up with new data entering the organization can take time. Intervention can be manual and repetitive in nature, which reduces the efficiency of the data stewards, causing delays in curation and diminished value.

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Introducing Alation Bots: Specialized, flexible automation services that help eliminate manual, repetitive tasks. Bots monitor the contents of the Alation Data Intelligence Platform and automatically trigger notifications via a Conversation, assigned task, or other action.

Bots Summary

  • Bots automate monitoring and curation tasks to help you accelerate adoption.

  • Think of Bots as “Adoption Drivers”—they can be key tools in your governance and catalog strategy.

  • Bots work in the background to provide the levels of automation organizations increasingly desire.

  • Alation Bots are not just about automation. They also provide invaluable support to stewards and curators, ensuring the ongoing “sustainability” of their catalog and governance program.

  • Alation Bots also play a crucial role in ensuring users have access to more complete and up-to-date information, thereby enhancing data accuracy and completeness.

  • Bots that automatically detect and highlight violations of practically any rule you care to define help you meet quality and compliance targets.

Benefits of Bots

The 3 main benefits of Bots are:

  1. Maximizes Scale & Quality: Bots help ensure quality, consistency, completeness is maintained, maximising the success and adoption of your enterprise catalog and governance program.

  2. Minimizes Intervention: Adding stewards to keep up with a growing enterprise catalog is impractical.

  3. Enables Governance: Institutionalising governance requires it to be ubiquitous, actionable and AUTOMATED.

Typical Bots Use Cases

The Top 5 most popular use cases for Bots are:

  1. Completeness - Are all titles present? What about your descriptions? Have you assigned the item to a domain yet? Is the description at least 50 characters long?

  2. Ownership - Does the item have a steward assigned to it? Does your company use data owners? If so, have you assigned one yet?

  3. Current Content - You’ve added all your policies into Alation, but when was the last time you checked that they are up to date?

  4. Metadata Changes - Has someone added a new table to the database you’re the Steward of? Does it now need to be properly curated?

  5. Governance - Data may be flagged as PII, but are your data policies attached?