Elementary Data

Elementary is an open-source web app and server designed for dbt-native data observability. It enables teams to detect issues, identify root causes, and resolve problems within data pipelines by monitoring data quality and reliability. The software provides a framework for tracking the health of data transformations and ensuring that the information flowing through a warehouse remains accurate and trustworthy.

The software operates as a CLI that connects directly to a data warehouse to read metadata, artifacts, and test results. It works in conjunction with an Elementary dbt package to generate observability reports and send notifications to communication platforms. By leveraging the existing dbt ecosystem, it allows users to implement monitoring without leaving their primary transformation environment, making it suitable for deployment in modern data stacks.

Key features

• Anomaly detection tests that collect quality metrics as native dbt tests
• Automated monitors for detecting freshness, volume, and schema issues
• End-to-end data lineage for impact and root cause analysis
• Data quality dashboard for monitoring and test results
• Performance tracking for models and job run results over time
• Configuration-as-code management within dbt code
• Actionable alerts with custom channels and owner tagging
• Data catalog for exploring descriptions, columns, and dataset health
• dbt artifacts uploader to save metadata and run results

Elementary is built for analytics engineers and data operations teams who use dbt to manage their transformations. It integrates with warehouses such as BigQuery, Snowflake, and Redshift to surface anomalies and failed tests. The system utilizes a dbt-native approach, meaning monitoring is integrated directly into the transformation layer rather than existing as a separate external check. This architecture allows the tool to capture detailed metadata and run results as part of the standard dbt execution process, which is then visualized through the generated reports.

This tool serves as a reliability layer for data warehouses, focusing specifically on the observability of dbt-managed pipelines and the governance of data assets.