Getting Started

Welcome to OpenMetadata's unified platform for data discovery, observability, and governance. Our platform centralizes all data context to help you build high-quality data and AI assets. This guide provides the necessary information to set up your OpenMetadata environment in 30 minutes.

How Does OpenMetadata Work?

OpenMetadata is designed to support both technical and non-technical data practitioners across various use cases, including data discovery, lineage, observability, quality, collaboration, governance, and insights.

The platform includes a library of 80+ turnkey connectors to easily ingest metadata from sources such as data warehouses, data lakes, streaming platforms, dashboards, and ML models. For custom data sources, APIs are available to streamline metadata ingestion. Metadata from these sources is organized into a Unified Metadata Graph, providing a single, comprehensive source of truth for your entire data estate.

This centralized metadata is accessible through a unified user interface, eliminating the need for practitioners to switch between multiple catalogs, quality, or governance tools. OpenMetadata can also be extended with applications, such as AI-driven productivity tools like MetaPilot, or through custom-built workflows that integrate the platform with existing systems. The platform’s native collaboration features support shared workflows, enabling different teams—data platform engineers, governance professionals, data scientists/analysts, and business users—to collaborate effectively in a single environment.

Key Features of OpenMetadata

Before we get started, here’s a quick summary of some of OpenMetadata’s main features:

Discovery

• Integrated catalog, data quality, and glossary
• Natural language search, filtering, and faceting
• 80+ turnkey data connectors

Lineage

• Table and column-level lineage
• Automated data estate mapping with APIs
• Lineage layers, search capabilities
• Governance and PII automation, with manual customization

Observability

• Alerting and notifications
• Incident management and third-party notifications
• Pipeline monitoring, root cause analysis, and anomaly detection
• Data profiler for performance insights

Quality

• Table and column-level test cases
• No-code and SQL-based data quality tests
• Test suites, reporting, and dashboards
• Quality lineage maps and widgets for data insights

Collaboration

• Announcements, tasks, and team conversations
• Slack/Teams integration for communication
• Activity feed and team dashboards for tracking progress

Governance

• Business glossary and classification tags
• Automated PII classification and description generation

Insights

• Data asset analytics and app usage metrics
• Coverage KPIs and ownership dashboards
• Data health and governance reports

Onboarding Journey

In this section, you will find a series of guides to help you get started with OpenMetadata. These guides cover both basic and advanced features of the platform, organized in a step-by-step format and divided into milestones that can be achieved over the course of your onboarding process.