Trigger Email as an Action

This guide will help you trigger emails as an ActionA Python class with a run method that takes a Validation Result and does something with it . It will allow you to send an email including information about a Validation ResultGenerated when data is Validated against an Expectation or Expectation Suite., including whether or not the ValidationThe act of applying an Expectation Suite to a Batch. succeeded.

Prerequisites

• An email account configured on the SMTP server you're going to use to send email
• Identified the email addresses for sent messages
• A CheckpointThe primary means for validating data in a production deployment of Great Expectations. configured to send email

Edit your configuration variables with email related information

Open uncommitted/config_variables.yml file and add the following variables by adding the following lines:

smtp_address: [address of the smtp server]
smtp_port: [port used by the smtp server]
sender_login: [login used to send the email]
sender_password: [password used to send the email]
sender_alias: [optional alias used to send the email (default = sender_login)]
receiver_emails: [addresses you want to send the email to]  # each address must be separated by commas

Update action_list in your Checkpoint configuration

Locate the relevant checkpoint that you want to set up an email trigger for. Open the checkpoint's configuration file that is located at great_expectations/checkpoints/ (for example, great_expectations/checkpoints/checkpoint_01.yml) and add an email action to the action_list. Follow the snippet below to set up the detials of your email trigger.

action_list:
  - name: send_email_on_validation_result # name can be set to any value
    action:
      class_name: EmailAction
      notify_on: all # possible values: "all", "failure", "success"
      notify_with: # optional list containing the DataDocs sites to include in the notification. Defaults to including links to all configured sites.
      # You can choose between using SSL encryption, TLS encryption or none of them (not advised)
      use_tls: False
      use_ssl: True
      renderer:
        module_name: great_expectations.render.renderer.email_renderer
        class_name: EmailRenderer
      # put the actual following information in the uncommitted/config_variables.yml file
      # or pass in as environment variable
      smtp_address: ${smtp_address}
      smtp_port: ${smtp_port}
      sender_login: ${sender_login}
      sender_password: ${sender_password}
      sender_alias: ${sender_alias}
      receiver_emails: ${receiver_emails}  # string containing email addresses separated by commas

Test your updated Action list

Run your Checkpoint to Validate a BatchA selection of records from a Data Asset. of data and receive an email on the success or failure of the Validation. See Run your Checkpoint.

If successful, you should receive an email that looks like this:

Additional notes

If your great_expectations.yml contains multiple configurations for Data Docs sites, all of them will be included in the email by default. If you would like to be more specific, you can configure the notify_with variable in your Checkpoint configuration.

The following example will configure the email to include links Data DocsHuman readable documentation generated from Great Expectations metadata detailing Expectations, Validation Results, etc. at local_site and s3_site.

# Example data_docs_sites configuration in `great_expectations.yml`
data_docs_sites:
  local_site:
    class_name: SiteBuilder
    show_how_to_buttons: true
    store_backend:
      class_name: TupleFilesystemStoreBackend
      base_directory: uncommitted/data_docs/local_site/
    site_index_builder:
      class_name: DefaultSiteIndexBuilder
  s3_site:  # this is a user-selected name - you may select your own
    class_name: SiteBuilder
    store_backend:
      class_name: TupleS3StoreBackend
      bucket: data-docs.my_org  # UPDATE the bucket name here to match the bucket you configured above.
    site_index_builder:
      class_name: DefaultSiteIndexBuilder
      show_cta_footer: true

# Example Checkpoint configuration
action_list:
  - name: send_email_on_validation_result # name can be set to any value
    action:
      class_name: EmailAction
      notify_on: all # possible values: "all", "failure", "success"
      #--------------------------------
      # This is what was configured
      #--------------------------------
      notify_with:
        - local_site
        - gcs_site
      use_ssl: True
      use_tls: False
      renderer:
        module_name: great_expectations.render.renderer.email_renderer
        class_name: EmailRenderer
      # put the actual following information in the uncommitted/config_variables.yml file
      # or pass in as environment variable
      smtp_address: ${smtp_address}
      smtp_port: ${smtp_port}
      sender_login: ${sender_login}
      sender_password: ${sender_password}
      sender_alias: ${sender_alias}
      receiver_emails: ${receiver_emails} # string containing email addresses separated by commas

Additional resources

The EmailAction uses smtplib. For more information about this module, see smtplib — SMTP protocol client.