Bots Prerequisites

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

The following prerequisites are required before you deploy Bots.

  1. The Alation Services Manager needs to be installed. ASM is a framework providing components such as UI, scalable processing engines, configuration management, and scheduling for Bots.

  2. Alation Analytics (AAv2) is required. Bots uses Alation Analytics to monitor catalog content.

Note

  • Customers using ACS need their Alation Analytics data replicated to Snowflake. Please refer to the Connect Third-Party BI Tools to Alation Analytics V2 (Set Up Third-Party BI Access to Alation Analytics section) and follow the steps to setup and connect to Alation Analytics on Snowflake.

  • Customers using self-hosted Alation will need to give Bots access to Alation Analytics (Postgres). Please refer to the Connect Third-Party BI Tools to Alation Analytics V2 (Third-Party BI Access on Customer-Managed (On-Premises) Instances section) and follow the steps to give External Access to Alation Analytics.

  1. A service account for your Alation instance is needed. Bots needs access to Alation to query Alation Analytics when monitoring catalog content, and to make Alation API calls when taking action. Follow these steps to create a service account:

  1. Create a new user using basic authentication (for customers using SAML, follow the process described here)

  2. In Alation admin settings, Grant this user Catalog Admin access rights

  3. Grant this user view rights to the Alation Analytics data source

  1. To prepare your Alation catalog for Bots, create the following custom fields in Alation’s Settings > Custom Fields:

Custom Field Type

Custom Field Name

Object Set

Bot - Violations

People Set

Bot Managers

When creating them in the UI the two, new custom fields should appear like this:

../../../_images/FDEbotsCustomfield1.png


../../../_images/FDEbotsCustomfield2.png

  1. Now create a Custom Policy Template. Name the template Bot Policy and insert the Bot Managers custom field into this template:

../../../_images/FDEbotsCustomPolicy.png

  1. Finally add the Bot Violations custom field to all otypes you intend to have Bots operate on. For example, here we are adding the Bot Violations custom field to the Table template:

../../../_images/FDEbotsTableTemplate.png