Crawl Databricks AI/BI dashboards
Databricks AI/BI dashboard support is in private preview and is enabled per tenant. The Import AI/BI Dashboards and Enable Dashboard Lineage options stay hidden in the workflow setup until the feature is enabled for your tenant. To request access, raise a support request.
Atlan can discover and catalog Databricks AI/BI dashboards, also known as Lakeview dashboards. Once crawled, each dashboard appears in Atlan as a Dashboard asset alongside your other Databricks assets, and you can extract lineage from the dashboard to the Unity Catalog tables and columns it reads.
Dashboard metadata comes from the Databricks Lakeview REST API, not from Unity Catalog system tables. This means dashboard crawling requires the System Tables extraction method and depends on workspace-level access controls rather than catalog grants.
Prerequisites
Before crawling dashboards, make sure you have:
- Feature access enabled for your tenant: The Import AI/BI Dashboards and Enable Dashboard Lineage options stay hidden in the workflow setup until the feature is enabled. Raise a support request to request access.
- System Tables extraction method selected: Dashboard crawling isn't available with the REST API or JDBC extraction methods.
- Cross-workspace extraction disabled: Dashboard crawling isn't supported when cross-workspace extraction is turned on. If you need both, run a separate single-workspace crawl for dashboards.
- A Unity Catalog-enabled Databricks workspace
- Set up the Databricks connector in Atlan
- Crawled Databricks assets at least once
Permissions required
In addition to the standard Databricks connector permissions, the Atlan service account requires:
- CAN VIEW on every dashboard you want to catalog, or on the workspace folders that contain them. Granting CAN VIEW at the workspace level covers all current and future dashboards without per-dashboard grants.
- CAN MANAGE on a dashboard if you want Atlan to populate its owners. This is optional—see Dashboard owners.
For the full privilege breakdown, see Permissions for Databricks AI/BI dashboards. If dashboards are missing after crawling, see Why are some dashboards missing after crawling?.
Configure crawler
To configure the crawler for dashboards:
- Follow the standard Crawl Databricks steps.
- For the extraction method, select System Tables. The Import AI/BI Dashboards option isn't available with the REST API or JDBC methods.
- Turn on Import AI/BI Dashboards.
- Run the workflow.
After the workflow completes, Dashboard assets appear in Atlan under the crawled connection.
Atlan skips the dashboard crawl when cross-workspace extraction is turned on. You can turn on both options, but the workflow succeeds without producing any dashboards. Run a single-workspace crawl to catalog dashboards.
Turn off dashboard crawling
If you turn off Import AI/BI Dashboards after a crawl has already published dashboards, the next run removes those dashboards from Atlan. The crawler stops extracting them, so they're absent from the snapshot Atlan compares against the previous run, and Atlan archives them.
Turning the option back on re-crawls your dashboards, and they reappear with their metadata on the next run.
Re-enabling the option restores dashboard assets, but not their lineage. Run the lineage and usage workflow with Enable Dashboard Lineage turned on to rebuild lineage.
Dashboard owners
Atlan sets a dashboard's owners from the users granted CAN MANAGE on it. Group and service principal grants are skipped, because an owner is a person.
Reading these grants requires CAN MANAGE on the dashboard. If the service account doesn't have it, Atlan catalogs the dashboard without owners rather than failing the crawl—so a dashboard with no owners in Atlan usually means the service account couldn't read its permissions.
What Atlan crawls
For each dashboard, Atlan catalogs:
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| Name | The dashboard's display name in Databricks |
| Path | Workspace path of the dashboard, including its file name |
| Workspace ID | Identifier of the workspace containing the dashboard |
| Warehouse ID | Identifier of the SQL warehouse backing the dashboard |
| Lifecycle state | Whether the dashboard is active or trashed |
| Genie space enabled | Whether the dashboard has an associated Genie space |
| Source URL | Direct link to the published dashboard in Databricks |
See also
- Extract Databricks dashboard lineage: Build lineage from dashboards to the tables and columns they read.
- Permissions for Databricks AI/BI dashboards: Full reference of the privileges required to crawl dashboards and extract their lineage.
- What does Atlan crawl from Databricks?: Complete list of assets and properties Atlan crawls.