Set up Elementary

Building reliable, trustworthy data pipelines shouldn’t be painful. Elementary gives you a clear, fast path to understanding your data, monitoring its health, and responding before problems impact your business. This guide walks you through everything you need to onboard successfully, from connecting your stack to configuration and setting up your first workflows. Once you’ve completed the technical setup, continue with Start Using Elementary to begin using Elementary in practice. With Elementary, you’ll quickly be able to:

• Catch issues proactively before they affect consumers
• Maintain reliable and compliant data across your ecosystem
• Establish clear ownership and accountability
• Help everyone discover and understand the data they use

Let’s get you set up.

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Elementary’s Core Principles

• Code as the source of truth - Elementary keeps your code as the system of record. Any change made in the app opens a pull request in your repository, fitting naturally into your CI/CD process and keeping engineers in control. You can work from code, from the UI, or through MCP and everything stays aligned.
• Scaling reliability with AI - Elementary uses AI to help you scale your reliability practices. Ella, our network of AI agents, assists with test creation, metadata enrichment, troubleshooting, and optimization so teams can stay proactive and focus on higher-value work.
• Enabling all users - Elementary is built for the entire organization. Business users get a clear catalog, ownership information, health scores, and AI assistance so everyone can find, understand, and trust the data without depending on engineering.

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Technical Setup

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Setup and integrations

• Create Elementary cloud account (quick-start guide)
• Create an environment and connect your data warehouse
  Elementary reads metadata (information schema, query history, and dbt artifacts if you use dbt) to power test results, run history, automated freshness/volume monitors, and column-level lineage.
• Choose the assets the environment monitors
  Add asset sources: warehouse databases and schemas, dbt projects, or both — dbt is optional.
• Install Elementary dbt package (optional)
  Only if you use dbt. Collects dbt artifacts and enables Elementary’s built-in tests (anomaly detection, schema change detection). If you already have the package deployed in the relevant environment you want to monitor, make sure it’s up to date to the latest version, and upgrade it if not.
• Invite team members
• Code repository connection (optional)
  Allow users and AI agents to open PRs and manage changes through your CI/CD process.
• Integrate with your BI tool (optional)
  Enable column-level lineage and full context for BI assets, including the health of upstream sources and models.
• Connect to your external Catalog (Optional)
  Present Elementary data health context in another catalog, we support Atlan.
• Report assets from Python (optional)
  For transformations that run in Python, the Elementary Python SDK reports assets and test results into the environment, alongside the assets synced from the warehouse.

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Alerts & Incidents

• Connect messaging app (Slack / MS Teams)
  Receive alerts where your team already works.
• Connect incident management tool (optional)
  We support Opsgenie and PagerDuty.
• Connect ticketing system (optional)
  We support Jira, ServiceNow and Linear.

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AI Agents

• Sign AI features consent form
  Elementary AI uses only metadata, not raw or personal data. LLMs run via Amazon Bedrock with no data sharing to third parties. Learn more here.
• Elementary to open AI Features

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Advanced Setup

• Schedule Elementary syncs with your data warehouse.
• Contact the Elementary team to enable Okta SSO, AWS PrivateLink, or Microsoft Entra ID.
• Configuring Elementary for Development and Production
• Manage environments
  Separate environments per target (dev, staging, prod), and group several asset sources into one environment for unified lineage.
• Collect job information from orchestrator
  Elementary can collect metadata about your jobs from the orchestrator you are using, and enrich the Elementary UI with this information.

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Security and permissions

• Configure roles and permissions in Elementary (optional).
• Add SSO authentication with Okta or Azure AD (optional).
• Connect using AWS private link (optional)
• Export user activity logs (optional).