Set up Lakewatch for your workspace

Preview

Lakewatch is in Private Preview. To request access, reach out to your Databricks account team.

The first time you open Lakewatch, a guided Welcome to Lakewatch flow sets it up in Unity Catalog. It creates a Lakewatch environment (a catalog registered with Lakewatch) and the folders (schemas) that hold your datasources and detection rules, then grants access so your team can start using it. You can adjust access and move to least-privilege permissions later. See Set up Lakewatch access control.

note

Before you can complete setup, your workspace must meet the Lakewatch prerequisites, including Unity Catalog and serverless compute.

When you see the setup screen

You see the Welcome to Lakewatch screen when you open Lakewatch and no one in your workspace has set up an environment yet. A Lakewatch environment is required, so there's no way to skip setup: the screen appears every time you sign in until someone completes it. After setup is complete, you go straight to Lakewatch.

Complete setup

Under Get started with Lakewatch, choose how much to configure, then select Create. Completing setup requires permission to create a new catalog, or the MANAGE and CREATE SCHEMA privileges on an existing catalog you choose.

• Recommended configuration: Lakewatch creates a new catalog named lakewatch, adds the default folders (datasources for datasources and detection for detection rules), and grants everyone in the workspace permission to administer the environment and collaborate in it. Use this to get started quickly; you can adjust access and move to production-grade permissions whenever you're ready.
• Custom configuration: You control the setup. Create a new catalog or register an existing one, rename the datasource and detection folders, and set who gets access (the permissions on each folder and the catalog-level Lakewatch administrators). For an existing catalog, you can also choose whether to reconfigure its workspace binding. Use this to match an existing Unity Catalog structure or to restrict access from the start.

When you select Create, Lakewatch creates the catalog and schemas as needed, registers them as your environment and folders, applies the grants, and opens the Lakewatch overview page.

For the privileges that control what users can do with Lakewatch resources, see Roles and capabilities.

Next steps

• Configure Lakewatch settings for the catalog.
• Set up a detection warehouse to run scheduled detections.
• For least-privilege, team-based access, set up access control.
• Walk through the full workflow in the end-to-end walkthrough.