Model notifications beta

Set up dbt to notify the appropriate model owners through email about issues as soon as they occur, while the job is still running. Model owners can specify which statuses to receive notifications about:

• Success and Fails for models
• Warning, Success, and Fails for tests

With model-level notifications, model owners can be the first ones to know about issues before anyone else (like the stakeholders).

Beta feature

This feature is currently available in beta to a limited group of users and is gradually being rolled out. If you're in the beta, please contact the Support team at support@getdbt.com for assistance or questions.

To be timely and keep the number of notifications to a reasonable amount when multiple models or tests trigger them, dbt observes the following guidelines when notifying the owners:

• Send a notification to each unique owner/email during a job run about any models (with status of failure/success) or tests (with status of warning/failure/success). Each owner receives only one notification, the initial one.
• Don't send any notifications about subsequent models or tests while a dbt job is still running.
• At the end of a job run, each owner receives a notification, for each of the statuses they specified to be notified about, with a list of models and tests that have that status.

Create configuration YAML files in your project for dbt to send notifications about the status of your models and tests.

Prerequisites

• Your dbt Cloud administrator has enabled the appropriate account setting for you.
• Your environment(s) must be on "Versionless".

Configure groups

Define your groups in any .yml file in your models directory. For example:

models/groups.yml

version: 2

groups:
  - name: finance
    description: "Models related to the finance department"
    owner:
      # Email is required to receive model-level notifications, additional properties are also allowed.
      name: "Finance Team"
      email: finance@dbtlabs.com
      favorite_food: donuts

  - name: marketing
    description: "Models related to the marketing department"
    owner:
      name: "Marketing Team"
      email: marketing@dbtlabs.com
      favorite_food: jaffles

Attach groups to models

Attach groups to models as you would any other config, in either the dbt_project.yml or whatever.yml files. For example:

models/marts.yml

version: 2

models:
  - name: sales
    description: "Sales data model"
    config:
      group: finance

  - name: campaigns
    description: "Campaigns data model"
    config:
      group: marketing

By assigning groups in the dbt_project.yml file, you can capture all models in a subdirectory at once.

In this example, model notifications related to staging models go to the data engineering group, marts/sales models to the finance team, and marts/campaigns models to the marketing team.

dbt_project.yml

config-version: 2
name: "jaffle_shop"

[...]

models:
  jaffle_shop:
    staging:
      +group: data_engineering
    marts:
      sales:
        +group: finance
      campaigns:
        +group: marketing
    

Attaching a group to a model also encompasses its tests, so you will also receive notifications for a model's test failures.

Enable access to model notifications

Provide dbt Cloud account members the ability to configure and receive alerts about issues with models or tests that are encountered during job runs.

To use model-level notifications, your dbt Cloud account must have access to the feature. Ask your dbt Cloud administrator to enable this feature for account members by following these steps:

1. Navigate to Notification settings from your profile name in the sidebar (lower left-hand side).
2. From Email notications, enable the setting Enable group/owner notifications on models under the Model notifications section. Then, specify which statuses to receive notifications about (Success, Warning, and/or Fails).

Example of the setting Enable group/owner notifications on models