Manta Flow Alation: Alation Requirements

The following are the prerequisites necessary for IBM Automatic Data Lineage to connect to this third-party system, which you may choose to do at your sole discretion. Note that while these are usually sufficient to connect to this third-party system, we cannot guarantee that the connection or integration will be successful since we have no control, liability, or responsibility for third-party products or services, including for their performance.

• Alation-Automatic Data Lineage compatibility matrix:

  • Alation 2020.3 (Build 5.17.0) is the lowest version of Alation supported

• The following Alation features have to be turned on.

  • Lineage API v2 has to be enabled—the feature flag alation.feature_flags.enable_lineage_v2 has to be set to true

  • Virtual BI Server Sources API (GBM V2) has to be enabled—the feature flag alation.feature_flags.enable_gbm_v2 has to be set to true

  • It is recommended (but not necessary) to enable Swagger API documentation in case it is necessary to execute ad-hoc API queries —the feature flag alation.feature_flags.enable_swagger has to be set to true

  • It should be possible to enable these features by following the instructions, but it is strongly recommended to consult Alation support before doing so:

    1. Connect to the Alation server via ssh

    2. Execute sudo service alation shell

    3. Execute alation_conf alation.feature_flags.enable_lineage_v2 -s True alation.feature_flags.enable_gbm_v2 -s True alation.feature_flags.enable_swagger -s True

    4. Execute alation_action restart_alation

  • When Filesystem export is configured, you must have the File System Admin privilege in Alation so that Manta export into Alation involving lineage to/from a filesystem is successful.

• Connection parameters for Alation:

  • Alation base application URL

  • Authorization options:

    • Default mode: Use an Alation username and password to allow Automatic Data Lineage to automatically create authorization tokens. After that, Automatic Data Lineage will be able to automatically generate tokens whenever you need to authorize an export. Reach out to Alation support to obtain your credentials.

    • Manual mode (as of R42.9): Use Alation User ID (numeric) and manually created Alation API refresh token for that user to authorize an export. Refresh tokens automatically expire after 60 days. To authorize another export after that time, you'll need to request another token from Alation and enter it in IBM Automatic Data Lineage. Select this authentication method when using SSO/SAML in Alation, as the Default mode will not work in this setup.

    • Legacy mode: Use an Alation API access token for the authorization process. You’ll need to request a new token every time you want to authorize an export, as tokens expire after 24 hours (unless longer validity is configured in Alation). Reach out to Alation support to obtain your API access token.

    • In either case, the user leveraged by Automatic Data Lineage requires the SERVER_ADMIN role in Alation.

  • If HTTPs should be configured for the integration, the public certificate for the Alation application is needed