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Quickstart

This guide will take you from defining data models to exploring data and sharing data with your team.

Once you get access to Glean, you will be invited to login to a project. Users can belong to multiple projects, but data cannot be shared between projects. So users, permissions, database connections, data models and every other resource is isolated in the context of a project. Typically your entire organization can be managed in a single project.

Not ready to connect to a database?

You can use a Sandbox demo project to test the functionality of Glean with sample datasets.

1. Add a database connection

Also see database connections for configurations specific to different database types.

Firewall Configuration

If you use a firewall to restrict access to your database, you'll need to allowlist Glean's IPs.
Glean will always connect to your database from one of these IP addresses. 

18.210.29.198
34.230.230.9

modal to add database connection

  1. Go to the Settings page
  2. Click + New Database Connection
  3. Select the type of database; either Athena, BigQuery, Snowflake, Postgres or Redshift
  4. Enter the credentials according to your type of database
  5. Click Test to test your connection
  6. Click Add to complete the process

2. Define a data model

Every chart and analysis is based on a Glean data model.

  1. Go to your project homepage and click New Data Model

  2. Select a database connection, click on a table name, and click Build Model

    Using a SQL Query

    Each Glean data model is based on an underlying data table. If the data in your data isn't quite in the right format, it's possible to specify an underlying query as the basis for your data model.

  3. Define the data model

    1. Edit the name of the data model at the top of the page
    2. Add additional metrics and attributes by clicking Add metric and Add Attribute next to the name of the field
    3. Create a SQL based custom metric by clicking + Add Custom Metric (see Metrics for more details)

  4. Click Save Model then click Open in Explore to start exploring the data

3. Start interacting with your data

data explorer view

  1. Go to the Data Models page
  2. Click on the name of the data model we just created

Congratulations

You're ready to begin interacting with your data

Next, learn how to use the Attributes Tray to filter and breakout your data