How to crawl ThoughtSpot

Updated January 12, 2024 09:02

Once you have configured the ThoughtSpot permissions, you can establish a connection between Atlan and ThoughtSpot.

To crawl metadata from ThoughtSpot, review the order of operations and then complete the following steps.

Select the source

To select ThoughtSpot as your source:

In the top right of any screen in Atlan, navigate to +New and click New Workflow.
From the Marketplace page, click ThoughtSpot Assets.
In the right panel, click Setup Workflow.

Choose your extraction method:

In Direct extraction, Atlan connects to your database and crawls metadata directly.
In Offline extraction, you will need to first extract metadata yourself and make it available in S3.

To enter your ThoughtSpot credentials:

For Extraction method, Direct is the default selection.
For Hostname, enter the hostname of your ThoughtSpot cloud instance in the following format — <company_name>.thoughtspot.cloud.
For Authentication, select the method you configured when setting up the ThoughtSpot access permissions:
- For Basic Authentication, enter the username and password you created.
- For Trusted Authentication, enter the username of your ThoughtSpot instance and the secret key you created.
Click the Test Authentication button to confirm connectivity to ThoughtSpot.
Once authentication is successful, navigate to the bottom of the screen and click Next.

Atlan supports the offline extraction method for fetching metadata from ThoughtSpot. This method uses Atlan's thoughtspot-extractor tool to fetch metadata. You will need to first extract the metadata yourself and then make it available in S3.

To enter your S3 details:

For Bucket name, enter the name of your S3 bucket.
For Bucket prefix, enter the S3 prefix under which all the metadata files exist. These include output/thoughtspot-example/filter/answers/result-0.json, output/thoughtspot-example/filter/liveboards/result-0.json, output/thoughtspot-example/filter/answer-sql-queries/result-0.json, and so on.
For Bucket region, enter the name of the S3 region.
When complete, at the bottom of the screen, click Next.

To complete the ThoughtSpot connection configuration:

Provide a Connection Name that represents your source environment. For example, you might use values like production,development,gold, or analytics.
(Optional) To change the users who are able to manage this connection, change the users or groups listed under Connection Admins.
🚨 Careful! If you do not specify any user or group, no one will be able to manage the connection — not even admins.
Navigate to the bottom of the screen and click Next to proceed.

Before running the ThoughtSpot crawler, you can further configure it.

On the Metadata page, you can override the defaults for any of these options:

To select the assets you want to include in crawling, click Include tags. (This will default to all assets, if none are specified.)
To select the assets you want to exclude from crawling, click Exclude tags. (This will default to no assets, if none specified.)
For Assets without tags, keep the default option Yes to skip crawling assets without tags or click No to enable crawling them.

💪 Did you know? If an asset appears in both the include and exclude filters, the exclude filter takes precedence.

To run the ThoughtSpot crawler, after completing the steps above:

To check for any permissions or other configuration issues before running the crawler, click Preflight checks — currently only supported for offline extraction method.
You can either:
- To run the crawler once immediately, at the bottom of the screen, click the Run button.
- To schedule the crawler to run hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly, at the bottom of the screen, click the Schedule Run button.

Once the crawler has completed running, you will see the assets on Atlan's asset page! 🎉