Agents: An Introduction

Agents are systems which take a goal and use tools to achieve that goal.

Alation provides several out-of-the-box agents for common use cases, such as searching for catalog objects, answering questions from dashboards, answering questions on Data Products, generating charts, and more. These agents have sensible default prompts and tool configurations, and are intended to be a starting point to explore the capabilities of Agent Studio. These are available via REST API calls and via MCP.

Beyond out-of-the-box agents, users may also create custom agents tailored to their specific needs. Users define the agent’s goal, select the tools it can use, and customize the prompts to guide its behavior. These custom-built agents allow for solving a unique use case with a high degree of accuracy and predictability. One helpful starting point is to “clone” an existing out-of-the-box agent and modify it to suit your requirements.