🎉 What's new

Atlan now supports a hierarchy-based discovery experience for Sigma datasets and data elements, dbt models, and Salesforce objects.

✨ Let's dig deeper

The following enhancements are currently supported for the above asset types:

• A new Fields tab in the asset sidebar.
• A new Field Preview section in the asset profile.
• Opening a field asset in a new tab leads to a view of the parent asset profile with the child asset displayed in the sidebar.

With greater visibility into logical parent-child relationships for even more asset types to the quick discovery of field assets across data sources, power your documentation and lineage analysis in Atlan with these enhancements.

👏 Give it a shot

Get more context for your assets with this enhanced discovery experience — and let us know what you think!

🎉 What's new

We are excited to announce native support for Kafka events in Atlan! Kafka is an event-streaming platform that enables real-time data transfer between business applications. With this integration, data teams can now discover and document operational metadata from their Kafka systems in Atlan.

👏 Let's dig deeper

Atlan currently only supports fetching metadata from Apache Kafka and Confluent Cloud. The following asset types are supported:

• Topics
• Consumer groups

The current package does not support schema registry and schema type definitions.

The native support for Kafka assets enables you to discover and enrich your operational metadata in Atlan, visualize the data flow with end-to-end lineage, and foster collaboration across your data teams through Slack and Jira integrations.

For example, while data engineers will be able to get insights into the operational context of upstream assets, business users will be able to examine the downstream consumption of assets and review the potential impact of upstream changes.

✨ What's next

We are actively working to enhance our Kafka integration by supporting more native asset types and other flavors of Kafka. Stay tuned for more updates!

Introducing hierarchical discovery patterns for your Tableau, Power BI, and Looker assets! Atlan now supports a hierarchy-based discovery experience for data source fields and calculated fields for Tableau data sources, columns for Power BI tables, and fields for Looker explores and views. 

The following enhancements are currently supported for the above BI assets:

• A new Fields tab in the asset sidebar — similar to the Columns tab for SQL assets.
• A new Field Preview section in the asset profile — similar to the Column preview section for SQL assets.
• Opening a BI field asset in a new tab will lead to a view of the parent asset profile with the child asset displayed in the sidebar.

With these enhancements, users will now be able to view logical parent-child relationships for their BI assets as well as easily discover field assets for their BI data sources for documentation and lineage analysis in Atlan.

Get more context for your BI assets with this enhanced discovery experience — and don't forget to share your feedback!

With Atlan's API-first approach, data teams in the Microsoft ecosystem can now bring in their Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) assets to power discovery, data lineage, and impact analysis in Atlan. Use our open APIs to programmatically drive the ingestion of your ADLS assets into Atlan.

Atlan currently supports the following capabilities:

• ADLS asset profiles — account, storage container, and Blob objects
• Filtering and discovery of ADLS assets
• Data lineage for visualizing data flow from ADLS objects to analytics tools

Note: We've launched this support through APIs — ADLS is currently unavailable as a native connector in Atlan.

Discover and enrich your ADLS assets in Atlan

We know that you love the Has lineage filter that helps you quickly discover assets with lineage. We’ve now added another filter to power your asset discovery — the Has readme filter!

The README filter enables you to quickly discover assets that have an attached README, providing more context to data teams right away. Alternatively, this out-of-the-box filter can help you discover assets that do not have a README attached. Data champions can then encourage their teams to enrich and curate such assets.

Give the new filter a shot and tell us what you think!

We are excited to introduce usage and popularity metrics in the lineage graph for your Snowflake and Google BigQuery assets in Atlan! 💥

Having the ability to analyze asset usage metadata and popularity scores right from lineage can help you discover assets that may be least queried or without any downstream usage. For example, these metrics can be especially useful to know when you're figuring out whether to deprecate certain assets in your data estate.

Usage and popularity metrics in asset lineage views can help you get one step closer to efficiently optimizing your operations and gaining the most value-driven insights from Atlan.

Tell us what you think about this new feature and stay tuned for more updates.

Understanding the changes to an asset and their impact are critical to building trust in your data assets. For instance, changes to an upstream asset can impact downstream data pipelines and dashboards, potentially causing disruption in an organization.

With this release, we bring to you the following enhancements:

• The option to download upstream assets, downstream assets, or both in Google Sheets.
• The ability to document metadata for impacted assets in Google Sheets and sync the changes back to Atlan. Atlan currently supports documenting descriptions, certificates, announcements, and owners for impacted assets.

Note: The Download Impact Analysis button has been renamed Download Lineage.

Before the Chrome extension for Sigma was available, users had to switch to Atlan for additional details about a data element — for example, who owns it and whether it is certified or not. With the Chrome extension support for Sigma release, all of this and more is now possible without leaving your favourite Sigma workspace.

Atlan’s Chrome extension for Sigma opens up a sidebar within the Sigma workspace and provides you with all the context you need without having to switch tools.

Descriptions are one of the most important metadata for any asset. Our users love the metadata sync from their sources to Atlan, and this upgrade will power sync capabilities even further.

Our users often use rich formats like Markdown when adding documentation to their assets — for example, through dbt. Such text formatting was not carried over in Atlan, resulting in poor readability.

We've enhanced Atlan’s description editor to support Markdown syntax. Descriptions in Markdown will now be retained in Atlan and appear in the asset sidebar, asset profile, and other areas — significantly improving readability.

Tableau supports nested project hierarchies, which were not visible as asset metadata during asset discovery. This led to ambiguity around project hierarchy, especially when multiple projects with the same name had different hierarchies.

Nested project hierarchy metadata is now available in Atlan!

• View nested project hierarchy on the project search card and Overview sidebar for easy identification.
• Click on the project name in the hierarchy to get details on the parent folders for quick discovery and context.

For example, if there are multiple projects with the same name Product Analytics nested within the Website, Mobile-iOS, and Mobile-Android project hierarchies, a user searching for Product Analytics in Atlan will now have additional context with the project hierarchy metadata available during discovery.

Based on the feedback received, we will continue making other enhancements — such as adding nested hierarchies for Tableau dashboards — to create an even better discovery experience for BI assets.