Anomaly Description

The Description is a business-friendly explanation of the data quality issue captured by an anomaly. It appears in the Description section of the anomaly details view and serves as a free-text field that complements the structured attributes (Status, Severity, Failed Checks, etc.) with narrative context.

For the step-by-step tutorial on editing, see Edit Anomaly Description.

How the default description is built

When Qualytics creates an anomaly during a Scan operation, it auto-fills the description by combining the messages of every failed check into a multi-line summary like:

Field customer_id is expected to be not null;
 Field email is expected to match pattern ^[^@]+@[^@]+\.[^@]+$

Each failed-check message includes the rule type, the field involved, and the expected condition that was violated. The default acts as a starting point: users can leave it as-is, refine it, or rewrite it entirely.

Editing the description

Any user with the Editor team permission (or higher) on the anomaly's datastore can edit the description. A pencil icon appears next to the Description label in the anomaly details view; hovering it shows the tooltip Edit description. Clicking the icon switches the section into edit mode, with the following actions:

The pencil icon is hidden on archived anomalies (Resolved, Duplicate, Invalid, Discarded) and for users without the Editor team permission.

AI-suggested description

When AgentQ is configured on the deployment, a second icon appears next to the Description label: a sparkle whose tooltip reads Suggest a description. Clicking it asks AgentQ to generate a candidate description from the anomaly's failed checks. The suggestion appears in an overlay with three options:

If AgentQ is not configured for the deployment, the Suggest button is hidden. For details on configuring AgentQ, see the AgentQ documentation.

For the full suggestion workflow (what the AI reads to build the suggestion, the 255-character length cap, provider timeouts, error handling, and cases where a suggestion is refused), see Description Suggestions in the AgentQ overview. The general workflow described there applies on the anomaly description surface, with the anomaly-specific permission note called out in the AgentQ overview itself.

Description and masked fields

If the failed check involved a masked field, the original value never appears in the description. The check failure message permanently shows <masked> in place of the actual value, both in the default description and in any later regeneration. To investigate the underlying value, reveal masked source records via the Source Records toolbar instead. See Masked Fields in Source Records. Note that the source-record view uses ***MASKED*** as its placeholder, distinct from the <masked> marker in anomaly descriptions.

Archived anomalies are read-only

Once an anomaly is archived (status Resolved, Duplicate, Invalid, or Discarded), the pencil and sparkle icons no longer appear on the anomaly details view. To edit the description through the UI, restore the anomaly first; see Restore Anomalies.

History tracking

Every description change is recorded in the anomaly's History section, alongside status changes, tag updates, assignee changes, and comments. Each entry shows:

• The user who made the change.
• The timestamp of the edit.
• The previous value and the new value, so you can see exactly what changed.

See the History section of the Anomaly Insights page for details on the timeline.

Permissions summary