Governance Action Framework (GAF)¶

The governance action framework (GAF) provides the interfaces and base implementations for governance action services that take action to:

• detect, report and eventually correct a situation that is harmful to the data or the organization in some way or
• to enhance the metadata to improve its use.

The governance action services can be used for three purposes:

• Provide the complete implementation and orchestration of a governance process.
• Provide coordination between processes run by specialized governance systems. For example, coordinating a DevOps pipeline with a data movement and quality process and security incident management.
• Provide contextual metadata plus an audit trail of actions managed by an external governance process.

Governance Action Service¶

A governance action service is a specialized connector that performs monitoring of metadata changes, validation of metadata, triage of issues, assessment and/or remediation activities on request.

There are five types of governance action services, each of which supports a specialist governance activity (see subsections).

These are often used in conjunction with the survey action services from the Survey Action Framework (SAF). Collectively they are called the governance services and they can be linked together into governance action processes.

Some governance action services invoke functions in external engines that are working with data and related assets. The GAF offers embeddable functions and APIs to simplify the implementation of governance action services, and their integration into the broader digital landscape, whilst being resilient and with good performance.

The governance request parameters are a collection of name-value properties that are passed to a governance action service via the governance action context when it starts.

Watchdog governance action service¶

The watchdog governance action service monitors changes in the metadata and initiates one of the following as a result:

• [engine action](/concepts/engine-action
• governance action process
• incident report

One example of a watchdog governance action service is to monitor for new assets. Another example is to monitor the addition of open discovery reports and take action on their content.

Verification governance action service¶

A Verification governance action service tests the properties of specific open metadata elements to ensure they are set up correctly and do not indicate a situation where governance activity is required. For example, it may check that a new asset has an owner assigned, is set up with governance zones and includes a connection and a schema.

The verification governance action services publishes guards to report on any errors it finds. It may also create incident reports to coordinate actions to correct any errors. The guards returned from the verification governance action service can be used to trigger other governance services as part of a governance action process.

Triage governance action service¶

Triage governance action services run triage rules to determine how to manage a situation that needs human intervention. This could be to initiate an external workflow, wait for manual decision or initiate a remediation request through either an external workflow or by creating a ToDo for a specific person.

Remediation governance action service¶

The remediation governance action service performs updates to metadata. Examples of the tasks performed by a remediation governance action service are assigning classifications, duplicate linking and consolidation.

Provisioning governance action service¶

A provisioning governance action service invokes a provisioning service whenever a provisioning request is made. Typically, the provisioning service is an external service or pipeline. The provisioning governance action service may also create lineage metadata to describe the provisioning if this is not performed by another service.

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