Integration update: dbt exposures now part of lineage graphs

dbt, both Core and Cloud, is the second most popular integration for Metaplane users (after warehouses)! We’re entirely unsurprised based on dbt’s meteoric rise as a powerful and scalable transformation solution in recent years. This makes our newest feature one that your team may be particularly excited to see pop up in your feed today: dbt Exposures!

Surfacing dbt exposures in your lineage graphs helps your team understand at-a-glance what’s impacted by data quality issues. It also helps you understand which stakeholders should be alerted when you’re about to merge a change. Our users have mentioned that their exposures often contain information about:

• Notebooks and other places where data is being used for machine learning
• Business intelligence tools using data from dbt models
• A/B Testing & Experimentation tools 

By having these outputs documented in your Metaplane lineage, your full-stack data visibility just got even more comprehensive. You’ll be able to understand true end-to-end lineage from ingestion, to your warehouses and models, and down through BI tools and other exposures; no additional work needed.

Data observability for dbt

In addition to dbt Exposures being included to lineage, integrating your dbt account will also unlock:

• Job duration monitoring–we feed your job metadata into our machine-learning models to alert your teams to long (or short) running jobs that are early indicators of silent data bugs.
• Pull requests related to incidents–Integrating dbt & GitHub allows us to highlight which model updates are correlated with any data quality incidents found in your warehouse.
• Data CI/CD–Integrating dbt & GitHub also helps your team prevent accidental data quality incidents caused by updates to your model(s) so that you can merge with confidence. Our GitHub app does this by surfacing both objects downstream of your model as well as forecasting what values will be impacted.

Getting started with Metaplane and dbt

If you already have a Metaplane account, you’ll need to connect dbt through an API key and/or commands in the CLI to sync lineage from your instance. 

Otherwise, to get started with Metaplane, you can create an account or pick a time to learn more about data observability best practices from the team. New users can setup connections and implement data observability monitors within the hour!