Skip to main content
Version: 1.5.3

GX Cloud overview

GX Cloud is a fully managed SaaS platform that simplifies data quality management and monitoring. With GX Cloud, you and your organization can work collaboratively to define and maintain shared understanding of your data.

GX Cloud concepts​

The key GX Cloud concepts described below provide a data validation vocabulary that represents your data, your data validation criteria, and the results of data validation. Within GX Cloud, these concepts are applied to define components and implement data validation workflows.

Data SourceData Source
A Data Source is the GX representation of a database or data store.
Data AssetData Asset
A Data Asset is a collection of records within a Data Source.
ExpectationExpectation
An Expectation is a declarative, verifiable assumption about your data. Expectations serve as unit tests for your data.
ValidationValidation
A Validation runs selected Expectations against a Data Asset to validate the data defined by that Data Asset.
Validation ResultValidation Result
A Validation Result captures the outcome of a Validation and related metadata that describes passing and failing data.

GX Cloud workflow​

GX Cloud data validation workflows are created using GX Cloud components, entities that represent GX Cloud data validation concepts.

Standard data validation workflow​

A GX Cloud data validation workflow can be implemented using the following steps:

Standard GX Cloud workflow

  1. Connect to your data.
  2. Create a Data Asset.
  3. Define Expectations.
  4. Validate your data.
  5. Review and share your Validation Results with your organization.

Additional workflow features​

There are a variety of GX Cloud features that support additional enhancements to your GX Cloud data validation workflow.

GX Cloud workflow enhanced with product features

  • GX Cloud user management. GX Cloud functions as a shared portal to manage and monitor your organization's data quality. Users can be invited to your GX Cloud organization and assigned a role that governs their ability to view and edit components and workflows in GX Cloud. See Manage users and access tokens for more details.

  • Data Asset profiling. GX Cloud introspects your data schema by default on Data Asset creation, and also offers one-click fetching of additional descriptive metrics including column type and statistical summaries. Data profiling results are used to suggest parameters for Expectations that you create.

  • Automate rules for Anomaly Detection. GX Cloud can automatically generate Expectations that detect column changes, volume changes that deviate from historical patterns, and changes to the proportion of null values in each column. This option is available when you create new Data Assets or add Expectations for an existing Data Asset.

  • Personalize rules with ExpectAI (BETA). GX Cloud can generate AI-recommended Expectations for a Data Asset. These will be personalized based on an analysis of a sample of your data.

  • Schedule Validations. GX Cloud enables you to schedule validations, so that you can test and assess your data on a regular cadence and monitor data quality over time. See Manage schedules for more detail.

  • Alerting. GX Cloud provides the ability to send alerts when validations fail, enabling your organization to remain proactively aware of the health of your Data Assets. See Manage alerts for more detail.

GX Cloud architecture​

GX Cloud architecture comprises a frontend web UI, storage for entity configuration and metadata, a backend application, and a Python API.

You interact using the UI, API, or both. How GX Cloud connects to your data depends on your deployment pattern.

  • GX Cloud frontend web UI. Enables you to manage and validate your organization's data quality without running code and provides shared visibility into your organization's Validation Results history.

  • GX Cloud data storage. Stores the configurations for your organization's Data Sources, Data Assets, Expectations, and Validations alongside your organization's Validation Result histories and Data Asset descriptive metrics.

  • GX Cloud backend application. Contains the necessary logic and compute to connect to data and run queries. The specifics of how the GX Cloud backend connects to your data is described in Deployment patterns.

  • GX Cloud API. Enables you to interact programmatically with GX Cloud entities and workflows using Python scripts.