Using the Skills
Once you’ve installed the plugin and connected it, you work with Alation by asking in natural language. Your tool picks the right skill from your request — you describe what you want, and the skill translates it into the right Alation API calls, handling errors, pagination, and multi-step workflows.
The skills
Section titled “The skills”Each skill bundles everything it needs: instructions, command schemas, and (on non-Claude platforms) the Alation CLI itself.
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
setup | Configures credentials and authenticates against your Alation instance |
ask | Queries data products, chats with Agent Studio agents, and invokes tools |
explore | Searches and browses the catalog, data products, and marketplaces |
curate | Manages data products, publishes to marketplaces, enriches metadata |
configure | Creates and manages agents, tools, LLMs, and data source connections |
automate | Builds, runs, and schedules recurring workflows |
You don’t invoke skills by name — just describe the task, and the agent routes to the right one.
Example prompts
Section titled “Example prompts”Explore and ask:
- “What marketing data do we have?”
- “Search the catalog for anything related to customer orders.”
- “What was our total revenue last quarter?”
Curate:
- “Add a description to the customer orders data product.”
- “Publish the finance data product to the marketplace.”
Configure and automate:
- “Create an agent that can answer questions about our finance data.”
- “Send me a summary of last week’s sales every Monday.”
Combining skills
Section titled “Combining skills”Most real tasks chain skills, and the agent moves between them on its own:
- Find, then ask:
explorelocates the right data product, thenaskqueries it. - Curate at scale:
explorefinds objects missing descriptions, thencurateenriches them. - Build, then schedule:
configurecreates an agent, thenautomateruns it on a cadence.