Data sources
A data source is one connection to a place your data lives — a Postgres database, a Snowflake account, an S3 prefix. Connect it once; Measured Cloud reuses it to add, profile, and validate your tables.
Data assets
A data asset is one table, view, or dataset you want Measured Cloud to look after. Its page is where you profile it, author its rules, and run them.
Rules
A rule is one thing you verify about a data asset — "email is never blank", "row count is between 1 and 10 million". Rules live on the asset they check.
Validations
A validation bundles the rules of one or more data assets into one runnable unit with a health score. You run it by hand or on a schedule.
Schedules
A schedule runs one or more validations automatically on a cron cadence, in your organization's schedule timezone, starting one execution run per validation each time it fires.
Execution runs
An execution run is one run of a validation — started by hand, by a schedule, or through the API. It fills in asset by asset and ends with a per-rule pass/fail result and a health score.
Health score
A health score is the share of rule checks that passed over the last 30 days of runs. Its complement is the failure rate — "12% of checks failed in the last 30 days".
Results
A result is the recorded outcome of a run — which rules passed, which failed, how many rows broke them, and samples of the failing rows.
Alerts
An alert is how Measured Cloud tells you something went wrong. Three model rows back it: an AlertRule is the configuration ("on every failure of the Nightly orders validation, post to Slack"); an Alert is one firing — a rule fires at most once per execution run; an AlertEvent is the dispatch log of that firing (the message it sent, or failed to send). Every rule's firings are listed in its Alert history, each linked to its run.
Incidents
Status: incidents are hidden from the app for now — they are off the sidebar and the command palette, and the Create incident alert action isn't offered for new rules. Existing incidents stay reachable by direct link, and the API below is unchanged. When incidents return to the navigation this page will say so.
Profile runs
A profile run is a statistical snapshot of a data asset taken at a point in time. Measured Cloud uses profile runs for three things: surfacing column metadata in the UI, seeding AI rule suggestions, and detecting anomalies against a rolling baseline.
Anomalies
An anomaly is a statistical deviation in a tracked metric — row count, null percentage, distinct count — relative to that asset's recent profile runs. Anomalies are how Measured Cloud catches problems your rules didn't explicitly assert against.
Root cause analysis
Status: first cut (FEATURE-410) — this slice ships the heuristic correlation surface and an optional AI narrative. Several signal families and the ML side are deferred; see What's deferred below.
AI features
Measured Cloud uses an LLM for explaining validation results and anomalies, narrating root-cause analysis, and translating natural-language descriptions into custom SQL rules. Driving rule authoring from your profile statistics is done through your own MCP-connected LLM — see Rule suggestions below.
Rule templates
A rule template is a reusable set of rules you author once and apply to many data assets, mapping column names where they differ.
Agent mode
When the customer's database lives behind a firewall, agent mode
Lakehouse checks (Iceberg + Delta)
Measured Cloud treats Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake tables as first-class datasources. You connect a catalog, point at a table, and add the same rules you would for a Postgres or Snowflake asset — Measured Cloud handles the snapshot read for you. Two extra rule types layer on top so you can alert on snapshot-level concerns no row-database adapter can replicate.
MCP server
Status: available (self-host); hosted endpoint rolling out. The MCP server is the first-class way to drive the platform with AI — bring your own MCP client (Claude, Cursor, the claude CLI) rather than an in-app chatbot. You can run it yourself today (Dockerfile.mcp, or the mcp service in infra/docker-compose.yml). A hosted public endpoint on Measured Cloud's fleet (the dq-cloud-mcp service) is being finalized behind a public load balancer — once live, its URL appears in Settings → Connect AI. Authentication is by a personal API key (dqk_…) carried as a bearer; OAuth-2.1 + Dynamic Client Registration is on the roadmap (see Roadmap below).
Multi-tenancy
Measured Cloud is schema-per-tenant multi-tenant. One Postgres database hosts every org's metadata; each org gets its own schema for its tenant-scoped data (datasources, assets, rules, validations, results, anomalies, suggestions).
Recycle bin
Deleting a datasource or a data asset in Measured Cloud does not destroy it. The object — and everything Measured Cloud owns underneath it — is moved to the recycle bin: soft-deleted, hidden from every normal list and query, but recoverable. Items sit in the bin for RECYCLEBINRETENTION_DAYS (30 by default), after which a daily cron purges them for good. Until then you can restore an item back to exactly where it was, or purge it early.