Start Using Elementary

With your environment connected (see Set up Elementary for technical onboarding), the next step is to see Elementary in action. We’ll take a few of your key assets and run them through the core reliability steps: setting clear ownership, adding the right tests, configuring alerts, and understanding how issues are detected and resolved. This gives you a practical, hands-on view of how Elementary keeps your most important data reliable.

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Identify Critical Assets

Goal: Identify business-critical assets in your pipeline and make sure their documentation and ownership are clear.

• In the Catalog, identify and mark three critical assets
• Add or update descriptions, tags, and owners for these assets
• Use AI Governance to complete missing metadata based on project context and according to your instructions.
• View end-to-end, column-level lineage for each critical asset

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Setup monitoring on critical assets

Goal: Ensure critical assets are covered with the right tests so issues are detected before they affect consumers.

• Open the Test Coverage view to understand existing coverage by dimension
• Add missing tests such as freshness, volume, uniqueness, anomaly detection, schema changes or custom logic
• Use AI Test Coverage for suggested tests based on patterns and lineage
• For source monitoring: Elementary automatically adds ML-based freshness and volume tests to all sources to catch pipeline and ingestion issues early

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Setup Alerts

Goal: Create a routing process that gets the right alerts to the right people while avoiding alert fatigue.

• Use tags, owners, and subscribers to define who should be notified and who is responsible for action
• Build an internal alert response plan: who fixes the issue, who needs awareness, and what the SLA should be (see the full playbook here)
• Create alert rules that translate this plan into routing, using tags, owners, subscribers, and severity

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Triage & Resolution

Goal: Investigate and resolve issues quickly and confidently.

• Triage: Review lineage and upstream failures alongside recent commits and dbt run history to understand what changed and what the issue is impacting
• Use AI Triage & Resolution to run the investigation for you by analyzing lineage, failures, recent changes, and dependencies, and surfacing root causes
• Use the Incidents screen to manage issues collaboratively and keep track of everything that’s currently open

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Optimize Performance

Goal: Meet your SLAs, improve run times, and ensure your pipelines operate efficiently.

• Identify long-running tests and models using the Performance pages
• Use AI Performance & Cost to optimize queries by surfacing inefficiencies, suggesting improved SQL patterns, and identifying opportunities to reduce data scans or simplify logic

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Measure Progress and Data Health

Goal: Track improvements in reliability and identify where further attention is needed.

• Use the Data Health screen to monitor overall health scores for your assets
• Filter the screen by domain, owners, or critical assets to measure progress at a higher resolution and keep accountability clear

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Enable analysts and business users

Goal: Make it easy for anyone to discover assets, understand what they represent, see how they’re built, and know whether they can be trusted.

• Use the Catalog to explore assets, their definitions, ownership, and current health status
• Review Lineage to see how the asset is built, what depends on it, and whether any upstream issues or test failures affect it
• Use AI Catalog to get clear explanations of the asset, how it’s calculated, and any current reliability concerns

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Advanced: Use MCP to Extend Elementary Everywhere

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For Engineers

Goal: Make development safer and faster by bringing full pipeline context into your coding environment.

• Enable Elementary MCP inside your IDE or coding assistant (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.)
• Add metadata or validations at scale without touching the UI or code manually
• Check lineage, coverage, and asset health while you code so you can spot issues early, understand downstream impact, and prevent problems from reaching production

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For Analysts and Business Users

Goal: Bring Elementary’s context into the tools people already use.

• Connect Elementary MCP to any MCP-enabled client (Claude, ChatGPT, or internal AI agents)
• Allow users to ask about assets, see definitions and ownership, review lineage, and check health or incidents directly through their AI assistant
• (Optional) Connect additional MCPs such as dbt or Atlan so users can navigate across multiple systems from a single conversational interface