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 Informatica CDI OCF connector, you must configure the connection to the Informatica CDI data source.

The various steps involved in configuring the Informatica CDI data source connection setting are:

Provide Access

To set the data source visibility,go to the Access tab on the Settings page of your Informatica CDI 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 Informatica Host

Use the following format for Informatica URL:

The values for cloud provider and region correspond to the name of the Point of Deployment (POD) that your organization uses. The following table lists the POD names and the corresponding cloud provider and region to use:

POD Name

Cloud Provider-Region

USW1

dm-us

USE2

dm-us

USW3

dm-us

USE4

dm-us

USW5

dm-us

USE6

dm-us

USW1-1

dm1-us

USW3-1

dm1-us

USW1-2

dm2-us

CAC1

dm-na

APSE1

dm-ap

APSE2

dm1-apse

APNE1

dm1-ap

APAUC1

dm1-apau

EMW1

dm-em

EMC1

dm1-em

UK1

dm-uk

To provide the Informatica URL in the Alation UI, perform the following tasks:

  1. On the Settings page of your Informatica CDI data source, go to the General Settings tab.

  2. In the Connector Settings > General Confoguration section, provide the required Informatica URL in the Informatica Host field.

Configure Authentication

For metadata extraction (MDE), the connector supports basic authentication.

Configure Basic Authentication

  1. On the Settings page of your Informatica CDI data source, go to the General Settings tab.

  2. In the Connector Settings section, provide the following details in the General Configuration section.

    Field

    Description

    Name

    Specify the user name of the Informatica CDI user account

    Password

    Specify the password of the Informatica CDI user account

    Folder Name

    The location(folder) of the Informatica mappings

  3. Click Save.

Test the Connection

After configuring authentication, test the connection.

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

The connection test checks the Informatica CDI REST API connectivity.

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 Informatica CDI 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 Informatica CDI 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.