Visualize your Einstein Analytics assets with the new Data Catalog
If you were at Dreamforce 2019 or followed along at home you may have heard about the new Einstein Analytics Data Catalog. If not read along, it’s nothing less than amazing! Earlier this year I and the rest of the London DataTribe had the pleasure of welcoming Skip Sauls who is the product manager at Salesforce for this new tool. Skip gave us a preview of how you can see the lineage of your Einstein Analytics assets and determine any dependencies and thereby issues if you delete something!
The best thing, the Data Catalog is available today!
Get it now
The Data Catalog is not an official part of the product, so you do need to complete a few steps to get access to the tool. The Data Catalog is a Salesforce Lab product and available via Salesforce AppExchange.
Find the Data Catalog here, click the green “Get It Now” button in order to start the installation process.
And that’s it, wait for the installation to get done – maybe play the new (hidden) Astro Flying game in Analytics studio until the Data Catalog installation is completed.
If you don’t know what it is then head to Analytics Studio, in the URL replace “home” with “astro” and let the game begin!
How can I use it?
Once installed head to the App Launcher (often referred to as the waffle, or so I’ve heard), find “Einstein Analytics Data Catalog” and click on the link.
When you open the tool you get a blank canvas ready for you to pick an asset to investigate.
To the left, you will see a tree menu with a category for each of the Einstein Analytics; App, Dashboards, Datasets, Lenses, Stories. If you click on any of them you will see a list of the related items from your environment. Once you select an asset you can see the children in the right-side panel, here you can pick the related items and see the lineage all the way to the source. It is a brilliant way of seeing the complexity of your setup. I especially like that I easily can see all the objects and fields from Salesforce or your connector that are in play in a dataset.
If you are not happy with the view you see, you can order the assets as you see fit by choosing the different build-in options – or simply drag and drop an item.
The cool thing is we can also see the dependencies. We all know that a dataset, as you can see in the example above, will be used in many dashboards but which? Click the dependency button in the icon bar and there you go, now you can see what will be affected if you do something to your dataset.
Finally, when you have found an asset you want to edit, why waste time finding it in Analytics Studio? Well, you don’t have to, just click the pencil icon and you are there!
So hopefully with this short intro, you can see how powerful the Data Catalog is. Not only will you be able to get an overview of your Einstein Analytics assets in one view, but you can track from app to fields in the dataset, so if you are thinking of deleting a field in Salesforce or your connector, you are now better equipt to see the consequences. I truly can’t want to see the next version of this Salesforce Labs app.
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Hi!
I can play “astro. But I can’t find “Einstein Analytics Data Catalog” in AppLauncher!
Thx!
I’ve seen it now. It didn’t appear immediately.
Hi Rikke,
Thanks for the summary. We have donwloaded and started to look into it.
I am not finding a way to see whether and a field is used in dashboards. My use case is to be able to identify in which dashboards a field is used (or not used at all, in which case, I have fewer issues in deleting it from a dataset).
Thanks!
Jonathan
Hi Jonathan,
The app doesn’t support that, but I would recommend giving that feedback in the app, maybe there is a way to add it in the future.
Rikke
Thanks, will do.
Thank you for this article. However, I am having an issue with the app. Whenever I launch it, I get a loading screen on the left hand panel which never finishes loading. After a bit of investigating I managed to get an error which said ‘ [Cannot read property ‘get’ of undefined]’. Do you have any idea what I should do?
Hi Rikke,
I’ve installed the app but I wasn’t able to find it in the AppLauncher. I’ve checked in the Installed Package page but it seems everything passed OK. Is there anything I am missing?
Thanks!
Silvina
Hi Rikke,
I have installed the app when I opened it and clicked on one of them in tree menu and cannot see the related list of items in my environment
’ve installed the app but I wasn’t able to find it in the AppLauncher. is this app in a working state ?
To find it, scroll all the way down to the All Items list, sorted alphabetically. You’ll see it there.
Can we install it in sandboxes as well? Somehow app exchange url always opened login. salesforce.com url to logiin ( from here https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=a0N3A00000G4xpvUAB)
Hi Rikke,
Does this give you a list of dashboards and their locations? Like on which user’s private app are they located?