Alation Cloud Roles and Responsibilities

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  • Outdated backup cleanup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

HA setup and maintenance

Alation

All HA setup and maintenance actions

Email server setup

Alation

Sendgrid service for emails

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

  • Customer

Migrating an on-premise deployment to the Cloud Service

SSO authentication setup

  • Alation

  • 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

  • Customer

Deploying and using a Cloud Sandbox environment

AWS PrivateLink configuration

  • Alation

  • 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