Catalog Activity Report

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

The Catalog Activity report is part of Analytics Stewardship. This report tracks catalog curation effort and changes to the physical metadata structure under data sources. As a steward, you can monitor the following changes:

• Curation changes:

  • Updates to Titles and/or Descriptions on specific objects

  • Updates to custom field values on specific objects by specific users

  • Updates to custom field values via catalog sets

Physical metadata changes:

• Creation or removal of tables in/from a schema

• Addition or removal of columns to/from a table

• Changes of data types of columns

Note

To be steward of a catalog object (data source, schema, table, or column), a user, group, or People Set must be added as a value to the Stewards field on the catalog page of this object.

The Catalog Activity report is available in two views:

• My Stewardship Catalog Activity on the Stewardship Dashboard (a personalized view for the logged-in user)

• Catalog Activity—Full Report that allows analyzing changes across all data sources in the catalog.

My Stewardship Catalog Activity

My Stewardship Catalog Activity view is located on the Stewardship Dashboard.

Note

The Stewardship Dashboard and My Stewardship Catalog Activity view are not available in the New User Experience.

By default, the report is pre-filtered to only display changes that affect catalog objects where the logged-in user is steward.

To open the full view that allows access to more data, click the All Catalog Activity link on top right of the personalized report.

Catalog Activity—Full Report

To open the full-page Catalog Activity report:

1. Open the Curate and Govern page.

2. Under Monitor, click Catalog Activity to open the report.

The full report includes information on two tabs:

• Curation Changes—Lists changes to custom fields, Titles, and Descriptions:

  • Apply Filters to Curation Changes

  • View Field History

  • View Changes Shared Via Catalog Sets

• Physical Metadata Changes—Lists metadata changes:

  • Apply Filters to Physical Metadata Changes

Curation Changes

The Curation Changes tab displays the following information:

Column	Description
Object affected by the change	Data source, schema, table or column affected by the change
Change details	Description of the change
By User	User who made the change
Time of change	Time when the change was made

The Catalog Activity report only displays changes to objects which the logged-in user has permissions to view.

This means that you:

• Only see changes to objects you are granted access to in the catalog. If you don’t have permission to view the object that is set as a value in a field, the change to this field will appear to you as it would on the catalog page when the value has not been set.

  Example:

  Let’s assume that you have permission to view Table A but you don’t have permission to access Table B. There is an Object Set type of custom field Tables on an Alation object you are viewing. At first, the field is set to Table A. Then the value is changed to Table B. As a result, in the Catalog Activity report, this change will appear to you as Tables changed: Table A -> Not Set because you cannot view Table B.

• Only see changes to the fields you are allowed to see in the catalog. For details on custom field permissions, see Manage Custom Fields.

Note

If the Steward filter is set to your name, you are viewing changes affecting Alation objects you are currently the steward of. The report doesn’t display the objects that you owned as steward in the past but no longer currently own.

Apply Filters to Curation Changes

There can be many changes to custom fields in an actively used catalog instance. You can apply filters and narrow down the segment of changes you are viewing.

Value and Conditions	Options	Description
Data Type is	Data Source, Schema, Table, Column	Select the Alation object type to view curation changes for. Select Any Type to view all.
Steward is	Users, Groups	Find and select steward(s) in the quick Search field. The default setting is the logged-in user.
Field Changed is	Catalog fields	In the catalog field list, select the fields to view the changes for. If you don’t see the field you’re looking for in the list, start typing its title in the search bar. For performance reasons, only a subset of custom fields is shown in the list. The list will update to display values that fit your search criteria. You can select Any Field to view changes to all fields.
Seven days before	Calendar widget	Using the calendar, set the week for which to display curation changes.

View Field History

You can view custom field history directly from the Catalog Activity report by hovering over a row and clicking See History on the right. For details on field history, see Viewing Field History.

View Changes Shared Via Catalog Sets

Changes shared from catalog sets are displayed as one row under the name of the catalog set. The Catalog Activity report will not list each individual catalog set member that was changed. The row that holds the catalog set name should be understood as a collective change relevant to all members of this set.

If you filter the report by Steward is, the catalog sets present in the filtered report indicate that there exist member objects with this steward assigned which have been affected by changes through the set.

Physical Metadata Changes

Column	Description
Name	Name of the object changed. To go to the catalog page of this object, click the Open Page icon.
Change	The type of change done to the object: Created Dropped Modified
Tables Changed	This label appears at the Schema level. Displays the number of tables in the selected schema affected by the change. Can be drilled down to the list of specific tables: click the number of tables changed to open this list.
Columns Changed	This label appears at the Table level. Displays the number of columns in the selected table affected by the change. Can be drilled down to the list of specific columns: click the number of columns changed to open this list.
Detailed	This label appears at the Column level. Displays details on the change to a column, such as the data type change.

Apply Filters to Physical Metadata Changes

To focus on the metadata changes to specific objects, you can apply a number of filters. Filters are joined with the AND logic.

Value	Options	Description
Show <object> changes	Schema Table Column	Select the type of object you want to view the metadata changes for.
for week of <first day of week>	List of first days of week that represent corresponding weeks.	Select the week you want to view the changes for.
Where steward is <user>	List of users. To view changes for all, select anyone.	Select the steward whose objects you want to view.
For <data source>	List of data sources. To view data for all, select any.	Select a data source to view the changes
And <schema title> schema	List of schemas of the selected data source. This filter will only be available on the table level if a specific data source is selected.	Select a schema to view the changes for.
And <table title> table	List of tables of the selected schema. This filter will only be available on the column level, if a specific data source and schema are selected.	Select a table to view the changes for.

Digest Emails

If you have subscribed to the Metadata Change email notifications, you will receive a weekly digest email on all metadata changes to objects you are the steward of. The digest email is sent out on Monday and includes updates from the previous week. It is limited to changes in 20 Schemas and 20 Tables, but includes a link to the full view of the Metadata Change report in the catalog. For details on notifications, see Email Notifications Preferences.