Using Policy Center¶
Applies from version 2021.4
Alation’s Policy Center is part of the Data Governance App. Alation surfaces data policies as the result of metadata extraction and ingestion, ensuring that data consumers are aware of their existence. This fosters a more ethical data culture.
Policy Center provides a single location for managing policies and data policies alike. Users can view policies extracted from the catalogued data sources as well as data objects associated with these policies. They can also take advantage of curated information found on dedicated Catalog pages of each Policy object.
Beginning in version 2021.3, policy extraction and ingestion have been implemented for Snowflake data sources. Alation supports extraction for two Snowflake data policy types:
Row Access
Dynamic Data Masking
The Alation Catalog also supports the displaying of masked values in data samples to authorized users only. The users who are not allowed to view the values, will only see masked strings.
Catalog pages of the cataloged Policy objects are based on the corresponding Catalog Template and can be curated like any other Catalog page.
Policy Center users can add columns to Data Masking policies directly from the Catalog.
How to Use Policy Center¶
To learn about how to enable the Policy Center page in your Data Catalog, see Enable Policy Center.
The Policy Center page displays the policies that are extracted from the Snowflake data source.
Before performing Metadata Extraction on a Snowflake data source, make sure that the Snowflake service account has the required permissions to perform extraction of policies. For more details refer to Privileges for Policy Center and Tags.
After the policies are extracted, they will be displayed on the Policy Center page as shown below. Users are allowed to curate the extracted policies in the Policy Center. Refer to Curating Policies.
Policies¶
Applies from version 2021.4
Policies are a generic type of Policy object that also can be found using Search and managed in the Policy Center. Linking to other Catalog objects using Object Set fields is available upon manual creation of a Policy.
Enable Policy Center¶
The Policy Center feature is enabled in Feature Configuration as follows:
Go to Settings > Feature Configuration.
Toggle on Enable Policy Center toggle on and click the Save changes button and save the changes.
After you enable it, the Policy Center icon appears in the Apps menu.
Click the Policy Center icon to view the Policy Center page that has the policies extracted from the Snowflake data source.
Customize the Policy Center Page¶
Alation provides the ability to customize Policy catalog pages by adding custom fields. The Policy data object template is available under the Custom Template tab of the Customize Catalog page. For more information, refer to Applying Custom Fields to Templates.