MCP Prompting Guide
Ready-to-use prompts for the Validio MCP Server that take you from exploring your data to triaging, diagnosing, and preventing data quality issues.
This guide collects ready-to-use prompts for working with Validio through the Validio MCP Server, using the AI assistant or MCP client of your choice. Copy a prompt as it is, or use it as a starting point and adapt it to your own data and goals.
Prompts contain placeholders in square brackets, such as [source] or [incident ID]. Replace each placeholder with the name of the resource or business context you are asking about before you send the prompt.
Prerequisites
To use these prompts, ensure that you have the following:
- Enable MCP Server checked under AI Features in your Validio Workspace settings. See Configuring Global Settings.
- An AI assistant connected to the Validio MCP Server. See MCP Server Setup.
Getting Started with MCP
Work through the stages in order: explore your data first, then focus on monitoring and action. Each stage has a goal and a few short starter prompts. The sections that follow give fuller prompts for each stage.
| Stage | Goal | Starter prompts |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Explore | Understand your data and what matters. | "What can you tell me about the data? Walk me through where I should start building validators." "Explore [table]: what are its key fields and data patterns?" |
| 2. Orient | Understand your monitoring coverage. | "Give me a one-paragraph overview of my workspace." |
| 3. Triage | Find what is broken and what matters. | "Prioritize incidents from the last 24 hours." "Which issues affect [critical dashboard]?" |
| 4. Diagnose | Trace the likely cause and affected assets. | "Do a root cause analysis (RCA) and trace [incident] upstream. Where did it start?" "Which downstream assets does this incident affect?" |
| 5. Improve | Close gaps and detect recurrence earlier. | "Recommend missing validators for [table/source]." "Set up the validators you recommended." |
Explore: Understand Your Data and What Matters to the Business
Start here when you are new to Validio or to a set of data, to find the datasets and fields that matter most before you build validators.
Explore a new environment
Use my Validio MCP and do data exploration. Help me identify the relevant datasets and critical fields so I know where I should start building validators. Then recommend in a table what sources and validators I should look at and why. Ask me for any business context needed to prioritize them.Find the data behind a business area
Which datasets support [business process]? List the tables, which source they come from, and who owns them, then mark the 3 most business-critical sources I should look at.Trace how a report or dashboard is produced
Trace how [dataset/KPI/dashboard] is produced using available lineage and metadata. Identify its upstream inputs, documented transformations, and downstream uses. Highlight current gaps.Profile a table or source
Profile [table/source] using the capabilities available to you. Summarize missing values, uniqueness, value distributions, and unusual patterns. Explain which findings matter most and which validators would cover them.Orient: Understand Your Monitoring Coverage
Use these prompts to see what Validio already monitors and where monitoring is missing.
Get an overview of your Validio workspace
Give me a concise overview of my Validio workspace: monitored sources, existing validators, and recent incident activity. What are missing setups I need to create?After the assistant lists the missing setups, ask it to create everything it recommended, or choose the ones you want.
Find monitoring blind spots
Where are the gaps in [source] monitoring? Check freshness, volume, schema, and field-level quality separately and tell me what is missing.Find inactive or misconfigured validators
Which validators haven't produced an incident or a result in the last 30 days? Flag any that might be misconfigured or attached to a source that isn't polling.Understand an unfamiliar source
Explain [source] to someone new to this dataset. Use its schema, descriptions, lineage, and validators to describe its purpose, dependencies, quality checks, and recent issues. Clearly separate documented facts from inferred meaning.Identify practical improvements
Review the Validio setup for [domain] and recommend three improvements we could make this week. Rank them by likely business value and implementation effort. For each, name the affected assets, supporting evidence, and a measurable success criterion.Triage: Decide What Needs Attention First
Use these prompts to sort current and recurring incidents by business impact, so you know where to start.
Prioritize today's incidents
Review incidents from the last 24 hours and any older incidents still open in [domain]. Rank the five that need attention first using severity, duration, and available downstream business context. Include incident references and the next action for each.Check a critical deliverable
We need [dashboard/report] for [business decision] by [time and timezone]. Review relevant upstream incidents and monitoring freshness. Identify known issues that could compromise this deadline, what remains unverified, and what we should investigate first.Recognize related issues
Review incidents in [pipeline/domain] over the last 48 hours. Identify groups that may share an upstream cause using lineage and timing. Explain the evidence for each relationship and which investigation could address the most downstream symptoms.Separate recurring problems from possible alert noise
Which validators in [domain] generated the most incident groups in the last 30 days? Examine recurrence, duration, metric patterns, and available incident feedback. Identify candidates for investigation or tuning; do not assume frequent alerts are false positives.Find persistent problems
Find the most persistent or recurring data quality issues in [domain] over the last 30 days. Rank them by observed disruption and downstream reach. Explain which deserve a permanent fix and identify recorded owners where available.Diagnose: Establish the Likely Cause and Affected Scope
Use these prompts to investigate a specific incident: where it started, what it affects, and what to do next. For more on how Validio traces incidents through lineage, see Root Cause Analysis.
To refer to an incident, use its incident ID or its name. You can copy the incident ID, which starts with IGP_, from the incident's URL in your browser's address bar.
Trace the likely origin
Investigate [incident ID or incident name] upstream through available lineage. Compare related incidents and their timing, accounting for validator windows. Identify the earliest observed anomaly and the most likely cause, distinguishing supporting evidence from hypotheses. Check whether values repeat across windows.Assess downstream impact
Trace the downstream dependencies of [incident ID/source]. Identify potentially affected tables, fields, and dashboards where available. Separate assets with observed quality issues from assets merely exposed through lineage, and prioritize what to validate first.Narrow the affected population
For [incident ID], compare the affected period with an appropriate healthy period using available metrics and profiling. Determine which fields or existing segments changed most, quantify the differences, and explain what additional data is needed to narrow the cause.Test competing explanations
Investigate whether the anomaly on [source] is better explained by late data, missing records, duplicates, or a change in business activity. Use available validator metrics, configuration, and upstream evidence. Rank the explanations and propose a targeted check for each unresolved hypothesis.Produce an investigation handoff
Summarize the investigation of [incident ID]: timeline, affected assets, likely cause, supporting evidence, and unresolved questions. Recommend the next remediation and verification steps. Link the relevant Validio resources and distinguish work inside Validio from changes required in the data pipeline.Improve: Close Gaps and Detect Recurrence Earlier
Use these prompts to turn what you have learned into better monitoring. For recommendations generated directly in Validio, see AI Recommendations.
Turn an incident into better monitoring
Based on our investigation of [incident ID], recommend the smallest set of validator changes that would detect this failure earlier. Compare with existing coverage and specify the source, metric, window, threshold approach, and any segmentation. Explain what each change would detect.Protect critical business fields
Review the schema, available profiling, and validators for [source], focusing on [critical fields] used in [business process]. Recommend missing checks for relevant risks such as nulls, duplicates, invalid values, freshness, and volume. Prioritize them and avoid duplicating existing coverage.Detect problems hidden by totals
Review whether aggregate monitoring on [source] could hide issues within [country/customer/product]. Recommend suitable segmented validators, considering different segment patterns, sparse data, and the number of segments. Explain which additional failures they could reveal.Improve alert usefulness
Review [validator] and its last 30 days of incidents alongside its windows, filters, and thresholds. Recommend configuration changes that could improve alert usefulness while preserving detection of important failures. Explain the trade-offs and how we should evaluate the changes.Implement and verify the selected changes
Implement the validator changes we selected above for [source], checking for equivalent existing validators first. Verify the resulting configuration and report what was created or updated, what is active or awaiting approval, and when results can be assessed. Explain how we will confirm the intended failure is detected.If approval workflows are enabled in the namespace, the changes the assistant makes are staged as drafts and must be approved in the Validio UI before they take effect.
Tips for Better Results
- Be specific. Name the exact sources, tables, fields, and incidents you are asking about.
- Provide business context. Tell the assistant which processes, reports, or decisions depend on the data, so it can prioritize what matters.
- Build on earlier answers. Prompts in later stages, such as "Implement the validator changes we selected above", work best in the same conversation as the analysis that came before them.
- Ask for explanations. Ask the assistant why it recommends something, to learn data quality best practices along the way.
- Iterate. Refine your request based on the assistant's responses.
Related Resources
Updated about 20 hours ago