Important Nexla Help Center Update:

Nexla's Zendesk Help Center pages are being deprecated and will soon no longer be available.

Nexla Documentation is now the home for Nexla's User Guides, with improved formatting and categories that are easier to navigate, providing a better overall user experience.

Please update any bookmarks to the new Nexla Documentation site (docs.nexla.com/user-guides).

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This article is a guide to help new users get started in Nexla.

The Quick Start Guide video in Section 1 is the easiest way to become familiar with Nexla. It introduces Nexla's interface and shows how to set up an example data flow. Additionally, Section 2 briefly describes each of Nexla's sections and the information and functions found there. Then, Section 3 provides step-by-step instructions for creating a simple example data flow.

For the version of this article pertaining to the previous Nexla UI, click here.

1. Quick Start Guide Video

2. Nexla's Interface Sections

Nexla's intuitive user interface allows anyone to easily and efficiently complete any data workflow—from data discovery to data flow design and management, governance, collaboration, user administration, and more.

In Nexla, the toolbar on the left side of the screen is used to navigate between each of the sections introduced below.

Navigation within sections: The Integrate, Collaborate, Monitor, and Settings sections contain multiple screens, which are accessed using the section toolbar indicated in the following example:

Overview: After logging into Nexla, users will first see the Overview section, which displays information about the user’s Nexla account, including usage, Nexset, and resource statistics as well as flow status summaries. Clickable links in each category provide additional details in Nexla’s other sections.
Integrate: In the integrate section, users can find everything needed to create new data flows or modify existing flows. The screens in this section display accessible data flows and projects, data sources, Nexsets, data destinations, and other flow components, along with associated information and functions.
Discover: In the Discover section, users can find all Nexsets to which they have access. Nexsets can be searched by ID, name, or applied tags, and any listed Nexset can be immediately transformed or sent to a destination from this section.
Collaborate: The Collaborate section allows users to easily understand and manage the resource-level access controls provided by Nexla, including viewing insights about user access by user or resource ID. This enables efficient collaboration among users, teams, or entire organizations.
Monitor: The screens available in the Monitor section provide streamlined access to all of the monitoring information and settings provided by Nexla’s powerful platform. Users can conduct any governance or troubleshooting task, ranging from checking the status of data flows and examining flow resources to triage issues to monitoring notifications and errors, auditing resource events, tracing the lineage of records, and more, directly within this section.
Settings: The Settings section provides account and organization management information and settings, including user account information and password management, as well as organization-level information and team creation and management settings available to Administrators.

3. How to Create a Data Flow

Nexla users can easily and efficiently create data flows that ingest data from anywhere, make any needed transformations to the data, and send the data to any destination in only a few steps.

This section provides instructions for setting up a simple data flow in Nexla. The instructions can be applied to any data flow, but in the example flow created here, data is ingested from a Snowflake source, transformed, and sent to a Rest API destination.

Completed Flow.png

3.1 Connect to a Data Source to Ingest Data

After logging into Nexla, navigate to the Integrate section by selecting from the platform menu on the left side of the screen.
Click at the top of the Integrate toolbar on the left.
In the Select Source Type screen, select the source type from which data should be ingested—for example, .

Once a source type is selected, the platform will auto-advance to the next screen.

To change the selected source type, click in the upper right corner of the screen, select the desired source type, and then click in the upper right corner to advance to the next screen.

Add or select the credential that should be used to connect to the source.
- Add a new credential:
  1. Click .
  2. Enter and/or select the required information in the Add New Credential window.
    
    Credential requirements vary depending on the source type, with some sources requiring URLs, access keys, and other parameters that must be obtained from the source application/location in addition to account information.
    
    Detailed information about credential creation for specific source types can be found in the Create a Data Source section of the Help Center.
  3. Once all of the required information has been entered, click at the bottom of the window to save the new credential, and proceed to Step 5.
- Use a previously added or shared credential:
  1. Select the credential from the list—for example, .
  2. Click in the upper right corner of the screen, and proceed to Step 5.
Select and configure the location from which data should be read.

The data source selection and configuration procedure varies according to the source type. Detailed instructions for each source type can be found in the Create a Data Source section of the Help Center.

Optional: Configure any desired advanced settings, such as the frequency at which data should be fetched from the source, in the Advanced Settings panel on the right.
Click in the upper right corner of the screen to save and create the data source. Nexla will now automatically scan the source for data and organize that data into a Nexset, which is a logical data product that is immediately ready to be transformed or sent to any destination.

3.2 View and/or Transform a Nexset

View the data in the Nexset:
1. Click the icon on a Nexset to open the Nexset Information screen.
2. Sample records from the Nexset are shown under the Schema & Samples heading at the bottom of the Nexset Information screen.
Transform the data in the Nexset:
1. Click the icon on a Nexset to open it in the Nexset Designer.
2. Create and apply Nexset Rules to make any necessary transformations to the data in the Nexset.
  
  The Nexset Designer Overview article provides in-depth information about and instructions for transforming data in the Nexset Designer.
1. Once the transformation is complete, click in the upper right corner of the screen to save the transformation and close the Nexset Designer.

3.3 Send a Nexset to a Destination

Click the icon on a Nexset to begin sending the data that it contains to a destination.
In the Select Destination Type screen, select the destination type to which data should be sent—for example, .

Once a source type is selected, the platform will auto-advance to the next screen.

To change the selected source type, click in the upper right corner of the screen, select the desired source type, and then click in the upper right corner to advance to the next screen.

Add or select the credential that should be used to connect to the destination by following the same instructions shown in Section 3.1, Step 4.
Select and configure the location to which data should be written.

The data destination selection and configuration procedure varies according to the destination type. Detailed instructions for each destination type can be found in the Create a Data Flow section of the Help Center.

Click in the upper right corner of the screen to save and create the destination.

Data will not begin to flow into the destination until it is activated, as shown in Step 6 below.
Once created, the destination must be activated to begin the flow of data into the destination.
- To activate the destination and begin writing data now, click .
- To activate the destination later, click in the top right corner of the screen.
  1. When Nexla should begin writing data to the destination, navigate to the screen, and click on the corresponding data flow to expand it.
  2. In the flow visualization, click on the destination to open the Destination menu.
  3. Click on the menu to activate the flow of data into the destination.