How to manage policies

Once you have created policies, you can manage and revise your policies, monitor policy breaches, report incidents, and more from the Policy center dashboard.

Monitor policies

To monitor your policies and take action:

1. From the left menu of any screen in Atlan, click Governance.
2. Under the Governance heading of the Governance center, click Policy center.
3. From the Overview tab in the Policy Center, you can:
   • Review the Action Required section:
     • Click Open incidents to take action on any open incidents. You can filter incidents by Closed, Open, or In-progress status. Select any incident to view more details and assets linked to the incident.
     • Click Policy breaches to examine policy breaches, which occur when any one condition is breached or violated for a particular policy.
     • View the total count of ungoverned assets in your Atlan workspace. Ungoverned assets refer to assets that are not governed by any policy in Atlan.
     • Click Policies to approve to review and approve policies pending your approval.
   • In the Policies section, view recent, draft, or starred policies.
   • In the At a glance section, view policies by policy type.
   • Under My Policies, view all the policies you have either created or are designated as an owner.
4. Change to the All policies tab to view all the policies in your Atlan workspace. You can filter policies by status — Active, Draft, or Deprecated. Select any policy to view more details.
5. Change to the Reporting tab to monitor activity related to all policies in Atlan.
   • For All Policies, visualize your policies in Atlan by type or status.
   • For Assets governed over time, visualize trends in your governed assets over time.
   • For Active policies by type, view active policies by policy type.
   • For Assets with multiple policies, view assets that fall under the purview of multiple policies.
   • For Policies with exceptions, view policies with defined exceptions.
   • For Activity, view an activity log for all your policies in Atlan.

Revise a policy

Atlan currently only supports revising an active policy that is within its validity period.

If a policy comes to the end of its validity period and you decide not to extend or revise it, the policy will be deprecated at the end of its validity period. Any assets within the scope of that expired policy will be automatically delinked and no new incidents will be generated. You will still be able to view the deprecated policy and assets within the scope of that policy in the policy center.

If you revise an existing policy, Atlan will create a new draft of that existing policy with the same details. You can then revise the policy details and set a new validity period. Only when the new version has been approved and becomes active, the previous version will be deprecated, and stop scanning assets and generating any new incidents.

Note that the workflow linking the revised policy to your selected assets has to run successfully in the background for the revised policy to become active and govern linked assets.

To revise an existing policy:

1. From the left menu of any screen in Atlan, click Governance.
2. Under the Governance heading of the Governance center, click Policy center.
3. Select a policy to revise.
4. From the top right, click the Revise policy button. This will create a new draft version of your existing policy. The previous policy will still be under enforcement until the new policy is approved, becomes active, and successfully linked to selected assets.
5. Edit the draft policy to make any changes, such as updating the validity period.
6. Submit the revised policy for approval. Only when the new version has been approved and becomes active, the previous version will be deprecated.

Atlan currently does not support policy deletion.

Report an incident

Once you have created data governance policies, Atlan will scan governed assets for any incidents and report them in near real time.

If any changes not compliant with your policy definition are detected among governed assets, Atlan will generate incidents automatically and notify the policy owners from the policy center. You can then take action on open incidents.

In addition to automated incident reporting, you can manually report incidents that may warrant attention.

To manually report an incident:

1. From the left menu of any screen in Atlan, click Governance.
2. Under the Governance heading of the Governance center, click Policy center.
3. Under Action Required, click Open incidents to open the Incidents sidebar.
4. From the Incidents sidebar, click Add new incident to manually report an incident.
5. In the Report new incident, enter the following details:
   1. For Brief Description, enter a brief description of the issue you have detected.
   2. For In-depth description, add details about the issue, including steps to reproduce the issue.
   3. (Optional) For Related Policy, select an impacted policy, if any.
   4. (Optional) For Add assets, select any and all impacted assets that may apply.
   5. Click Submit incident to submit your incident report.