What's Your Validatar Role?

Overview

Validatar users can be broken down into three primary categories:

• An admin
• A creator
• A viewer

Your view and interaction with Validatar depend on which of the three categories is your primary responsibility. Take a look at your role below to get a nuanced view of Validatar.

I'm An Admin

As an admin, you'll spend adequate time in Settings, Data Sources Settings, and Project Settings to manage the use of Validatar. This includes

• Setup configuration
• Adding Users and User Groups
• Creating Data Sources
• Managing permissions for Projects and Data Sources
• and more!

Responsibilities

Depending on the type of admin you are, you have access to a combination of global, data source, and project settings. Let's look at what managing a Validatar instance may be like.

1. Admins have to activate new license keys. Navigate to Settings > Licenses to get started.
2. As an admin, you must create any new users. New users can access Validatar by
   1. Entering login credentials created by the admin
   2. Using the forgot password feature to create a new password
3. We highly suggest creating user groups to better control permissions assigned for Validatar users.
   1. Ideally, user groups are people who require the same level of access to projects and data sources.
   2.  A Best Practice for grouping users is to group by team or by Validatar role (admins, testers, viewers)
4. As an admin, you'll have to create new data sources and/or assign other users Data Source Admin privileges so they can create data sources themselves. One of the main prerequisites to testing and observing your data is creating a connection to that data. So as an admin, you'll want to get data sources created immediately.
   1. Validatar ships with everything required to create SQL Server and Snowflake data sources. If you're using any other database engine, an admin will have to set up a new Database Engine under Settings before your data source can be used in its entirety.
5.  Admins usually assist with upgrading to a new Validatar version.

I'm A Creator

As a creator, you'll spend adequate time in Projects creating and editing tests, viewing results, and running jobs. As a creator, you'll have to work with admins to ensure you have the correct permissions and access to projects and data sources.

Responsibilities

Creators are mainly responsible for ensuring that testing is comprehensive enough for the organization's needs, tests are written accurately, and the right people have the right access to test results.

1. Learn how to create standard and template tests. Standard tests are used to test specific, narrow-ranging scenarios. Template tests are used to execute the same tests across multiple database objects. Building tests require knowledge of Validatar's test types, test data types, and results configuration.
2. You'll want to continuously monitor test results to assess the improvement of data quality. Continuous testing proves important for new deployments, code changes, regression testing, and ever-changing data. Validatar ensures that as new data arrives, it fits within the standards set and checked by tests. 
3. We want you to evolve from burdensome manual testing to simple and automated test execution. Automated testing uses jobs, template tests, and schedules to execute tests and view results without having to log into Validatar.
4. Help bridge the gap between business users and technical users by linking metadata to tests. By creating this connection, the team will be able to monitor the quality of each metadata object based on the results of the linked tests. You'll also be able to use profile results to create tests by linking the metadata.