> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.getcollate.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Getting Started Overview > Learn what Collate is, who it's built for, and how its eight core capability areas — discovery, lineage, observability, quality, collaboration, governance, insights, and AI — help data teams build trust in their data. # Overview Collate is a unified data management platform built for modern data teams. It brings together data discovery, observability, quality, lineage, governance, and collaboration in one place – so your team spends less time hunting for context and more time building trust in your data. Whether you're a data engineer connecting pipelines, a data steward classifying sensitive assets, or an analyst trying to find the right table, Collate gives you a single place to understand, manage, and collaborate around your data. ## Why Collate Data teams today face the same set of problems regardless of the tools they use: * **No one knows what data exists.** Assets are scattered across warehouses, dashboards, and pipelines with no central place to search or browse. * **Context lives in people's heads.** Documentation is missing, outdated, or buried in Slack threads and Confluence pages no one reads. * **Trust in data is low.** Without visibility into quality, lineage, and ownership, teams hesitate to act on data they can't verify. * **Governance is reactive.** PII is discovered after the fact. Policies are applied inconsistently. Stewardship is manual and slow. Collate solves all of this from a single platform, connected directly to your existing data infrastructure. ## Who Collate Is For Collate is built for the people who own, use, and are responsible for data in your organization: * **Data engineers** – connect sources, build lineage, monitor pipelines, and maintain data quality at scale * **Data stewards and governance leads** – classify assets, enforce policies, manage glossaries, and automate PII detection * **Data analysts and scientists** – search for trusted assets, understand context, and collaborate with owners * **Platform and infrastructure teams** – deploy and manage Collate in your cloud environment with full control over connectivity and secrets * **Data consumers and business users** – find the right data, understand what it means, and raise issues when something looks wrong ## How Collate Helps Data Teams Collate is organized around eight core capability areas. Each maps to a real problem data teams face every day. **Discovery** Find any data asset across your entire estate with natural language search, filters, and facets. * Ingest metadata from 100+ connectors across databases, warehouses, dashboards, pipelines, and ML models * Surface all assets in a single searchable catalog * Enrich assets with descriptions, owners, tags, tiers, and glossary terms For more information, see [Discovery](/how-to-guides/data-discovery). **Lineage** Understand where data comes from and where it goes – automatically. * Build table and column-level lineage from pipelines, transformation tools, and query history * Assess the impact of changes before making them * Trace data quality issues to their root source * Meet regulatory requirements for data provenance For more information, see [Lineage](/how-to-guides/data-lineage). **Observability** Monitor the health of your data in real time. * Set up alerting and notifications for pipeline failures, schema changes, and anomalies * Triage, assign, and resolve data incidents without leaving the platform * Integrate with Slack, Teams, PagerDuty, and other tools your team already uses For more information, see [Observability](/how-to-guides/data-quality-observability). **Quality** Define and run data quality tests without writing SQL. * Build no-code test cases for completeness, freshness, uniqueness, and custom business rules * Organize tests into suites and track pass rates over time * Visualize quality trends in built-in dashboards * Map quality failures to lineage to see downstream impact instantly For more information, see [Quality](/how-to-guides/data-quality-observability/quality). **Collaboration** Turn your data catalog into a living knowledge base. * Write Knowledge Center articles to document business context for key assets * Post announcements about breaking changes and assign tasks to teammates * Use team dashboards and activity feeds to stay aligned * Bring Collate's context into Slack and Teams via native integration For more information, see [Collaboration](/how-to-guides/data-collaboration). **Governance** Apply and enforce data policies at scale. * Define a business glossary of approved terms and link them to assets across your estate * Classify sensitive data with tags and automate PII detection using Collate AI * Assign data stewards and track stewardship activity * Use metadata automations to apply owners, tiers, domains, and classifications automatically as new assets are ingested For more information, see [Governance](/how-to-guides/data-governance). **Insights** Measure and improve the health of your data program. * Track coverage KPIs – how many assets have owners, descriptions, and quality tests * Monitor usage patterns to identify the most critical and most underused assets * Surface unused resources with the cost optimizer * Build custom dashboards and widgets to report on the metrics that matter to your organization For more information, see [Insights](/how-to-guides/data-insights). **Collate AI** Bring intelligence to every part of the platform. * Use AskCollate to query your metadata catalog in natural language * Automate description generation, PII classification, and glossary term assignment with AI agents * Build custom AI-powered workflows on top of Collate's metadata using the AI SDK For more information, see [Collate AI](/collate-ai).