Data health tile

With data health tiles, stakeholders will get an at-a-glance confirmation on whether the data they’re looking at is stale or degraded. It allows teams to immediately go back into Explorer to see more details and investigate issues.

The data health tile:

• Distills data health signals for data consumers.
• Deep links you into dbt Explorer where you can further dive into upstream data issues.
• Provides richer information and makes it easier to debug.
• Revamps the existing, job-based tiles.

Data health tiles rely on exposures to surface data health signals in your dashboards. When you configure exposures in your dbt project, you are explicitly defining how specific outputs—like dashboards or reports—depend on your data models.

Example of passing Data health tile in your dashboard.

Embed data health tiles in your dashboards to distill data health signals for data consumers.

Prerequisites

• You must have a dbt Cloud account on a Team or Enterprise plan.
• You must be an account admin to set up service tokens.
• You must have develop permissions.
• Have exposures configured in your project and source freshness enabled in the job that generates this exposure.

View exposure in dbt Explorer

First, be sure to enable source freshness in the job that generates this exposure.

1. Navigate to dbt Explorer by clicking on the Explore link in the navigation.
2. In the main Overview page, go to the left navigation.
3. Under the Resources tab, click on Exposures to view the exposures list.
4. Select a dashboard exposure and go to the General tab to view the data health information.
5. In this tab, you’ll see:
   • Name of the exposure.
   • Data health status: Data freshness passed, Data quality passed, Data may be stale, Data quality degraded.
   • Resource type (model, source, and so on).
   • Dashboard status: Failure, Pass, Stale.
   • You can also see the last check completed, the last check time, and the last check duration.
6. You can click the Open Dashboard button on the upper right to immediately view this in your analytics tool.

View an exposure in dbt Explorer.

Embed in your dashboard

Once you’ve navigated to the exposure in dbt Explorer, you’ll need to set up your data health tile and service token. You can embed data health tile to any analytics tool that supports URL or iFrame embedding.

Follow these steps to set up your data health tile:

1. Go to Account settings in dbt Cloud.
2. Select API tokens in the left sidebar and then Service tokens.
3. Click on Create service token and give it a name.
4. Select the Metadata Only permission. This token will be used to embed the tile in your dashboard in the later steps.

Set up your dashboard status tile and service token to embed a data health tile

5. Copy the Metadata Only token and save it in a secure location. You'll need it token in the next steps.
6. Navigate back to dbt Explorer and select an exposure.
7. Below the Data health section, expand on the toggle for instructions on how to embed the exposure tile (if you're an account admin with develop permissions).
8. In the expanded toggle, you'll see a text field where you can paste your Metadata Only token.

Expand the toggle to embed data health tile into your dashboard.

9. Once you’ve pasted your token, you can select either URL or iFrame depending on which you need to add to your dashboard.

If your analytics tool supports iFrames, you can embed the dashboard tile within it.

Examples

The following examples show how to embed the data health tile in Tableau and PowerBI.

PowerBI example

You can embed the data health tile iFrame in PowerBI using PowerBI Pro Online, Fabric PowerBI, or PowerBI Desktop.

Embed data health tile iFrame in PowerBI

Follow these steps to embed the data health tile in PowerBI:

1. Create a dashboard in PowerBI and connect to your database to pull in the data.
2. Create a new PowerBI measure by right-clicking on your Data, More options, and then New measure.

Create a new PowerBI measure.

3. Navigate to dbt Explorer, select the exposure, and expand the Embed data health into your dashboard toggle.

4. Go to the iFrame tab and copy the iFrame code. Make sure the Metadata Only token is already set up.

5. In PowerBI, paste the iFrame code you copied into your measure calculation window. The iFrame code should look like this:

       Website =
       "<iframe src='https://1234.metadata.ACCESS_URL/exposure-tile?uniqueId=exposure.EXPOSURE_NAME&environmentType=staging&environmentId=123456789&token=YOUR_METADATA_TOKEN' title='Exposure status tile' height='400'></iframe>"
   In the 'Measure tools' tab, replace your values with the iFrame code.

6. PowerBI desktop doesn't support HTML rendering by default, so you need to install an HTML component from the PowerBI Visuals Store.

7. To do this, go to Build visuals and then Get more visuals.

8. Login with your PowerBI account.

9. There are several third-party HTML visuals. The one tested for this guide is HTML content. Install it, but please keep in mind it's a third-party plugin not created or supported by dbt Labs.

10. Drag the metric with the iFrame code into the HTML content widget in PowerBI. This should now display your data health tile.

Drag the metric with the iFrame code into the HTML content widget in PowerBI. This should now display your data health tile.

Refer to this tutorial for additional information on embedding a website into your Power BI report.

Tableau example

Follow these steps to embed the data health tile in Tableau:

Embed data health tile iFrame in Tableau

1. Create a dashboard in Tableau and connect to your database to pull in the data.

2. Ensure you've copied the URL or iFrame snippet available in dbt Explorer's Data health section, under the Embed data health into your dashboard toggle.

3. Insert a Web Page object.

4. Insert the URL and click Ok.

   https://metadata.ACCESS_URL/exposure-tile?uniqueId=exposure.EXPOSURE_NAME&environmentType=production&environmentId=220370&token=<YOUR_METADATA_TOKEN>

   Note, replace the placeholders with your actual values.

5. You should now see the data health tile embedded in your Tableau dashboard.

Sigma example

Follow these steps to embed the data health tile in Sigma:

Embed data health tile in Sigma

1. Create a dashboard in Sigma and connect to your database to pull in the data.

2. Ensure you've copied the URL or iFrame snippet available in dbt Explorer's Data health section, under the Embed data health into your dashboard toggle.

3. Add a new embedded UI element in your Sigma Workbook in the following format:

   https://metadata.ACCESS_URL/exposure-tile?uniqueId=exposure.EXPOSURE_NAME&environmentType=production&environmentId=ENV_ID_NUMBER&token=<YOUR_METADATA_TOKEN>

   Note, replace the placeholders with your actual values.

4. You should now see the data health tile embedded in your Sigma dashboard.

Job-based data health Legacy

The default experience is the environment-based data health tile with dbt Explorer.

This section is for legacy job-based data health tiles. If you're using the revamped environment-based exposure tile, refer to the previous section. Expand the following to learn more about the legacy job-based data health tile.

 Job-based data health

In dbt Cloud, the Discovery API can power dashboard status tiles, which are job-based. A dashboard status tile is placed on a dashboard (specifically: anywhere you can embed an iFrame) to give insight into the quality and freshness of the data feeding into that dashboard. This is done in dbt exposures.

Functionality

The dashboard status tile looks like this:

The data freshness check fails if any sources feeding into the exposure are stale. The data quality check fails if any dbt tests fail. A failure state could look like this:

Clicking into see details from the Dashboard Status Tile takes you to a landing page where you can learn more about the specific sources, models, and tests feeding into this exposure.

Setup

First, be sure to enable source freshness in the job that generates this exposure.

In order to set up your dashboard status tile, here is what you need:

1. Metadata Only token. You can learn how to set up a Metadata-Only token here.

2. Exposure name. You can learn more about how to set up exposures here.

3. Job iD. Remember that you can select your job ID directly from the URL when looking at the relevant job in dbt Cloud.

You can insert these three fields into the following iFrame, and then embed it anywhere that you can embed an iFrame:

<iframe src='https://metadata.YOUR_ACCESS_URL/exposure-tile?name=<exposure_name>&jobId=<job_id>&token=<metadata_only_token>' title='Exposure Status Tile'></iframe>

Replace YOUR_ACCESS_URL with your region and plan's Access URL

dbt Cloud is hosted in multiple regions in the world and each region has a different access URL. Replace YOUR_ACCESS_URL with the appropriate Access URL for your region and plan. For example, if your account is hosted in the EMEA region, you would use the following iFrame code:

<iframe src='https://metadata.emea.dbt.com/exposure-tile?name=<exposure_name>&jobId=<job_id>&token=<metadata_only_token>' title='Exposure Status Tile'></iframe>

Embedding with BI tools

The dashboard status tile should work anywhere you can embed an iFrame. But below are some tactical tips on how to integrate with common BI tools.

Mode

Mode

Mode allows you to directly edit the HTML of any given report, where you can embed the iFrame.

Note that Mode has also built its own integration with the dbt Cloud Discovery API!

Looker

Looker

Looker does not allow you to directly embed HTML and instead requires creating a custom visualization. One way to do this for admins is to:

• Add a new visualization on the visualization page for Looker admins. You can use this URL to configure a Looker visualization powered by the iFrame. It will look like this:

Configure a Looker visualization powered by the iFrame

• Once you have set up your custom visualization, you can use it on any dashboard! You can configure it with the exposure name, job ID, and token relevant to that dashboard.

Tableau

Tableau

Tableau does not require you to embed an iFrame. You only need to use a Web Page object on your Tableau Dashboard and a URL in the following format:

https://metadata.YOUR_ACCESS_URL/exposure-tile?name=<exposure_name>&jobId=<job_id>&token=<metadata_only_token>

Replace YOUR_ACCESS_URL with your region and plan's Access URL

dbt Cloud is hosted in multiple regions in the world and each region has a different access URL. Replace YOUR_ACCESS_URL with the appropriate Access URL for your region and plan. For example, if your account is hosted in the North American region, you would use the following code:

https://metadata.cloud.getdbt.com/exposure-tile?name=<exposure_name>&jobId=<job_id>&token=<metadata_only_token>

Configure Tableau by using a Web page object.

Sigma

Sigma

Sigma does not require you to embed an iFrame. Add a new embedded UI element in your Sigma Workbook in the following format:

https://metadata.YOUR_ACCESS_URL/exposure-tile?name=<exposure_name>&jobId=<job_id>&token=<metadata_only_token>

Replace YOUR_ACCESS_URL with your region and plan's Access URL

dbt Cloud is hosted in multiple regions in the world and each region has a different access URL. Replace YOUR_ACCESS_URL with the appropriate Access URL for your region and plan. For example, if your account is hosted in the APAC region, you would use the following code:

https://metadata.au.dbt.com/exposure-tile?name=<exposure_name>&jobId=<job_id>&token=<metadata_only_token>

Configure Sigma by using an embedded UI element.