Alation Cloud Roles and Responsibilities

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

With Alation Cloud Service, all of the configurations or tasks on the backend of the Alation server will be performed by authorized Alation personnel.

Catalog users on the customer side with the Server Admin role can change the catalog settings and perform the configuration tasks available in the Alation UI.

Collaborative effort is required from both the Alation personnel and the customer admin team for a number of specific configuration tasks, such as setting up authentication or whitelisting the cloud instance IP on the corporate network.

See the table below for a breakdown of various activities and their respective owners:

Activity

Owner

Example

Application upgrade

Alation

  • Upgrades to patch releases and major releases

Security

Alation

  • Firewall configuration, pen testing, encryption

Backup management and backup restore

Alation

  • Daily backups

  • Outdated backup cleanup

  • Backup restores

Disaster recovery setup and maintenance

Alation

  • All disaster recovery setup and maintenance actions

Email server setup

Alation

  • Setting up an email service

Backend admin tasks

Alation

  • Enabling feature flags using alation_conf

  • Setting up Alation Analytics

  • Installing Alation Connector Manager

Server monitoring

Alation

  • Monitoring the state of the Alation server and processes

  • Accessing server logs for troubleshooting

License deployment

Alation

  • Managing application of licenses

Data migration

Alation and Customer

  • Migrating an on-premise deployment to the Alation Cloud Service

SSO authentication setup

Alation and Customer

  • Configuring SSO authentication for the Alation application and data sources.

  • SAML can be set up by the customer via the UI starting in 2021.4

Non-production environments

Alation and Customer

  • Deploying and using a non-production cloud environment

  • Data refresh from production to non-production (customer requests it and Alation performs it).

AWS PrivateLink configuration

Alation and Customer

  • Configuring AWS PrivateLink to connect to sources

IP whitelisting and FW access

Customer

  • VPC, opening firewall ports, IP whitelisting

Data source setup

Customer

  • Configuring data source connections in Alation UI

Alation Agent

Customer

  • Installing the Agent

  • Upgrading the Agent

  • Maintaining and troubleshooting the Agent

  • Installing and managing data sources on the Agent

Administration in Alation UI

Customer

  • Managing users and groups

  • Changing Catalog settings

  • Customizing Catalog page templates