User management
User management is a critical part of data governance, so Atlan's user management features should be a mainstay of how you organize and control access for people in your organization.
Adding and managing users from the Admin Center
It's super simple to invite and remove users from Atlan from the Admin Center. You can also manage existing users by adding them to groups or changing their roles, or set up SSO and SMTP configurations.
Creating and managing personas and purposes from the Governance Center
The Governance Center is where you can build policies to manage users' access.
Personas allow you to group users into teams, such as Financial Analysts or Cloud Engineers, and set policies based on the access those personas should have.
Purposes are where you can build policies based on the actions or access that a user might need.
💪 Did you know? You can use Atlan's policy-based access controls to manage access to PII and other sensitive data. This is a best practice for data governance.
Once you set these policies, Atlan will enforce them throughout your users' experience. This means that users who don't have access to a particular type of data will not be able to see it.
Asset profile
The asset profile in Atlan gives you a quick and clear understanding of what a data asset contains. You can think of the asset profile as the TL;DR about your data.
What's in an asset profile?
- Summary: The numbers of columns and rows, certification status (e.g. verified, draft, etc.), owner of the asset, and more
- Column Preview: An overview of column names and definitions
- Sample Data: A snapshot of what the data looks like (with anything sensitive hidden, according to your policies)
- Readme: An in-depth description of the asset that should provide all the context, knowledge, and links needed to fully understand the asset
- Lineage: Visualization of how your data asset relates to other assets, which helps you figure out upstream and downstream dependencies
Glossary
The Atlan glossary is a rich tool for defining and organizing your data terminology to improve transparency and share knowledge. No need to ask around about what a column name means. The glossary functions as a source of truth for teams to understand their data assets. Start keeping all your definitions in one (searchable!) place.
The glossary provides key intel on your data assets so you can quickly understand important attributes of your data, such as...
- Owners of your data, so you know who to ask for clarification
- Certificate status, to easily understand if the data is still in progress or ready to be used
- Linked Assets that are relevant to the term, so you can explore other helpful material
💪 Did you know? The glossary helps power Atlan's powerful search tool, so tagging and defining assets are critical to helping your team find what they need.
Discovery
We rely on search bars to find things in almost every corner of the internet. Atlan uses a similar search tool to help you explore your data assets. The discovery tool is Atlan's powerful in-platform search, powered by the terms, tags, and definitions you've added to your data.
Here are a few of the things that make Atlan's discovery awesome:
- Every attribute of your data is searchable in Atlan — saved SQL queries, schemas, links, and more. This lets you search far and wide to find exactly what you need.
Discovery allows you to toggle the type of data asset you are looking for.
- Intelligent keyword recognition sees through your typos to show exactly what you wanted, no matter what you actually typed.
- Search assets from just about any page in Atlan using Cmd/Ctrl+K or by clicking Search assets across Atlan at the top of any page.
- Control your search by using facets about your data (such as the verification status or owner) to find what's most important to you.
- Sort by popularity to quickly discover what assets your teammates are using every day.