Configure the Data Source Connection

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

After you install the Azure Data Factory (ADF) OCF connector, you must configure the connection to the Azure Data Factory data source.

The various steps involved in configuring the Azure Data Factory data source connection setting are:

Provide Access

To set the data source visibility, go to the Access tab on the Settings page of your Azure Data Factory data source, set the data source visibility using these options:

  • Public Data Source — The data source is visible to all users of the catalog.

  • Private Data Source — The data source is visible to the users allowed access to the data source by Data Source Admins.

You can add new Data Source Admin users in the Data Source Admins section.

Connect to Data Source

To establish the a connection to data source, you must:

Provide the Base URI

The base URI serves as the entry point for interacting with the Azure Data Factory resources and services through the REST APIs.

  1. On the Settings page of your Azure Data Factory data source, go to the General Settings tab.

  2. Enter https://management.azure.com as the base URI to access the Azure REST API services.

Provide the Token URI

The token URI serves as the endpoint for authentication and authorization processes. This allows users to obtain access tokens that is required to authenticate and interact with Azure services securely through REST API calls.

  1. On the Settings page of your Azure Data Factory data source, go to the General Settings tab.

  2. Enter https://login.microsoftonline.com as the token URI to access the Azure REST API services.

Configure Authentication

  1. On the Settings page of your Azure Data Factory data source, go to the General Settings tab.

  2. In the Connector Settings section, provide the following details in the Datasource Connection section.

    Field

    Description

    Tenant ID

    Specify the Microsoft Azure Tenant ID for authentication. This must be the tenant where you created the service principal.

    Subscription ID

    Specify the subscription ID of Azure.

    Client ID

    Specify the Application client ID or application ID.

    Client Secret

    Specify the Client secret associated with the client ID.

    Scope

    Specify the The required scope for executing the API. Must have read access to files.

    Resource Group Name

    Specify the resource group used for Azure Data Factory.

    Grant Type

    Set it to client_credentials.

  3. Save the configuration.

Test the Connection

The connection test checks database connectivity.

After configuring authentication, test the connection.

To validate the network connectivity, go to General Settings > Test Connection of the Settings page of your Azure Data Factory data source and click Test.

A dialog box appears confirming the status of the connection test.

Configure Additional Connection Settings

Apart from the mandatory configurations that you perform to connect to the data source on the General Settings tab, configure the following additional settings:

Configure Additional Datasource Connection

Alation can associate objects in a data source with objects in another source in the catalog through lineage. For example, you can show lineage between your data source and BI sources that use its data.

Provide additional connection information for the data source to see lineage across multiple sources on the Lineage chart.

Follow these steps:

  1. On the Settings page of your Azure Data Factory data source, go to the General Settings tab.

  2. In the Application Settings section, provide the following details:

    Field

    Description

    Connection URL

    Provide one or more comma separated values in the format: <host1>:<port1>,<host2>:<port2>

    For example: 10.13.71.216:1541,sever.com:154

  3. Save the settings.

Disable Automatic Lineage Generation

You can enable or disable the lineage for the data source to be generated automatically during metadata extraction (MDE).

  1. On the Settings page of your Azure Data Factory OCF data source, go to General Settings > Application Settings.

  2. Toggle Disable automatic lineage generation to disable and automatically generate the lineage.

Enable this option when you don’t want lineage to be automatically generated and prefer to create lineage manually or using an API.

By default, automatic lineage generation is enabled.

Configure Logging

To set the logging level for your Azure Data Factory (ADF) OCF data source logs, perform these steps:

  1. On the Settings page of your Azure Data Factory (ADF) OCF data source, go to General Settings > Logging configuration.

  2. Select a logging level for the connector logs and Save the settings.

    The available log levels are based on the Log4j framework.

You can view the connector logs in Admin Settings > Server Admin > Manage Connectors > Azure Data Factory (ADF) OCF connector.