External Catalogs

Users who want to use tagging capabilities outside of Immuta and pull tags from external table schemas can connect Collibra or Alation as an external catalog. If users have another catalog, or have customized their Collibra or Alation integrations, they can connect through the REST Catalog using the Immuta API. Users can also connect a Snowflake account to allow Immuta to ingest Snowflake tags onto Snowflake data sources.

Once they have been connected, Immuta will ingest a data dictionary from the catalog that will apply data source and column tags directly onto data sources. These tags can then be used to drive governance policies or classification frameworks. Using existing metadata from external catalogs can allow users to scale policy creation quickly.

Supported external catalogs

Immuta supports the following external catalogs:

• Alation

• Collibra

• Custom REST catalog

• Snowflake tag ingestion

Alation

Immuta's Alation integration supports importing both tags and custom fields, Alation's two primary ways of allowing data stewards to apply metadata to data assets.

• Tags: Tags are a single word or phrase that can be attached to most Alation objects by nearly anyone. For instance, users can add a PCI tag for financial data.

• Custom fields: Custom fields are key-value pairs that can only be attached and removed by authorized users. Unlike tags, custom fields can have multiple values associated with a single key. For example, the custom field DK_STEWARD could have MARKETING, FINANCE, and CUSTOMER values associated with it. Using Alation custom fields allows you to explicitly control who can modify information associated with that field inside of Alation, whereas Alation standard tags are modifiable by any user inside of Alation.

When pulled into Immuta, Alation tags and custom fields will be applied to data sources as either column or data source tags in Immuta. Importing both Alation tags and custom fields into Immuta provides full flexibility for customers leveraging the Alation enterprise data catalog, no matter what operating model they choose to document their metadata in Alation.

To configure Alation, see the Configure an external catalog guide.

Custom REST catalog

If users have an unsupported catalog, or have customized their Collibra or Alation integrations, they can connect through the REST Catalog using the Immuta API.

For more details about using a custom REST catalog with Immuta, see the Custom REST Catalog Interface Introduction.

Snowflake tag ingestion

Users can connect a Snowflake account to allow Immuta to ingest Snowflake tags onto Snowflake data sources. To learn more about Snowflake tag ingestion, see the Snowflake reference guide.

External Catalog Behaviors

• Tags ingested from external catalogs cannot be edited within Immuta. To edit, delete, or add a tag from an external catalog to a data source or column, make the change in the external catalog.

• You can configure multiple external catalogs within a single tenant of Immuta, but only one external catalog can be linked to a data source.

• Immuta searches all external catalog providers once per day and links data sources without an external catalog attached to them to the first catalog that matches.

Resources

• To configure an external catalog, see the Configuration how-to guide.

• To learn more about how Immuta can automatically tag your data with Discover, see the Discover introduction.