Workflow ownership
This FAQ covers how Atlan determines which identity runs a crawler or miner workflow, and what breaks when the owning account changes.
Why should I use a service account to create crawler workflows?
Atlan workflows run with the identity of the user who created them — the publish step impersonates the creator to write assets to the catalog. When that person leaves the company and their account is deprovisioned, every scheduled run fails, sometimes silently for months before anyone notices.
Create a dedicated Atlan user (for example, svc-atlan-workflows, tied to a shared mailbox in your IdP, admin role) and create all crawler and miner workflows while logged in as it.
What happens if the workflow creator is offboarded?
Scheduled runs fail. Only Atlan support can transfer workflow ownership — and historically, schedule ownership did not transfer automatically with workflow ownership, so request both explicitly.
Demoting the owner's Atlan role (for example, to Guest during offboarding) breaks scheduled runs even if the Power BI credentials are perfectly healthy.
Do manual re-runs use the creator's identity?
No. Manual runs use the clicking user's permissions, not the owner's. If a colleague re-runs a failing workflow and gets ATLAS-403 errors at the publish stage, check that they are a connection admin.