Monitor metrics for data quality variations

The procedures on this page require the Workspace Editor role, unless otherwise noted at the top of the procedure.

A metric periodically calculates values from a data asset and aggregates those results into a single value. A monitor provides a mechanism for generation of incidents when a metric value deviates from desired bounds. A monitor is associated with a single metric and specifies a range of values that are considered “out of bounds”. As time goes on and the metric is tracked, if a monitor is attached to a metric, the monitor will generate incidents when the metric value is found to be out of bounds. A monitor may be either a manual monitor, in which case the bounds are specified explicitly by the data analyst, or an anomaly monitor, in which case the bounds are generated by looking at the historical norms for the metric.

A metric can have many monitors, but each monitor belongs to only one metric.

Create a monitor for a metric

1. On the metric's chart, select Monitors -> + Add monitor.

2. If the Add Monitor dialog includes Threshold/Anomaly Detection buttons, choose Threshold to manually provide upper and lower bounds for the value, or choose Anomaly Detection to have the monitor observe the metric for a while and automatically decide what's abnormal behavior.

3. If you have an alerting channel ready and want incidents to generate alerts there, enter it under Select the channels to send notifications.

4. Toggle Mute to the right to prevent the monitor from generating alerts.

5. Click OK to save the new monitor and begin any training. After you finish setting up, the monitor detects when its metric's value is out of bounds and logs variations as incidents. A monitor can bundle consecutive variations as one incident or record them as separate incidents.