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Here’s a link to a checkbox version of this guide that you can download and use to track your progress: Download as markdown.
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.

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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.

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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 the Triage & Resolution AI agent 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 the Optimization AI agent 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 the Discovery AI agent 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