Learn about data observability in Unified Catalog (preview)

Data observability in Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog provides a bird's eye view into the health of the data estate as data flows between sources. The data stewards, experts, and those accountable for data health can view their data estate in a single screen, providing the ability to view the lineage of data assets all the way up to the structure of the governance domains. This single view helps users understand where data starts and ends, what the issues are, and where there's an effect on reporting obligations.

How data observability works

The visualizations in data observability bring together all of the metadata from Microsoft Purview Data Map, for things like technical data lineage, and from the Unified Catalog, for things like data quality. Data observability provides contextual views and on-demand custom views in a single diagram.

Having the right view of the metadata in a single place allows you to dig into questions about how data quality is changing across your data estate, and how your data's being used and by whom. Viewing the entire data estate at one time enables the central data team or federated data teams to quickly identify improvements in metadata, ownership, data quality, or data architecture.

Where observability shows up in Unified Catalog

You'll see an Observability tab when you look at a details page for a governance domain, a data product, and a glossary term. Also, the Data observability (preview) page under Health management in the left navigation provides a custom view of your entire data estate. See Observability views for details.

Next steps

• Get set up for observability
• Understand observability views