Ascend.io Unveils Custom Data Engineering Agents: Build Powerful Agents for Data Operations in Minutes, Not Months
New feature enables data teams to create intelligent, event-driven automation with simple YAML and markdown files and seamless external integrations
Ascend.io, the leader in Agentic Data Engineering, announced the launch of Custom Agents, a breakthrough feature that empowers data teams to build intelligent, context-aware AI agents in under 10 minutes using simple markdown files. Unlike traditional automation tools that require extensive development cycles, these agents leverage Ascend’s DataAware Automation Engine to create sophisticated data operations workflows that respond intelligently to real-time system events.
“Building powerful and safe AI agents shouldn’t take weeks,” said Sean Knapp, Founder & CEO of Ascend.io. “With Custom Agents, teams can build, test, and deploy sophisticated data operations automation safely in just a couple of minutes. This represents the next evolution of our Agentic Data Engineering platform—moving beyond built-in intelligence to user-defined automation that understands your unique business context.”
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Building powerful and safe AI agents shouldn’t take weeks. With Custom Agents, teams can build, test, and deploy sophisticated data operations automation safely in just a couple of minutes.”
— Sean Knapp
Intelligent Event-Driven Automation Made Simple
Custom Agents transform how data teams handle routine operations and incident response. When system events like pipeline failures, data quality issues, or performance anomalies occur, Ascend’s observability engine automatically triggers the appropriate agent. These agents then leverage Ascend’s unified metadata layer to understand the full context of the situation—from pipeline dependencies and data lineage to recent code changes—before taking intelligent action.
A typical workflow might unfold as follows: a critical pipeline failure triggers a custom agent that analyzes error logs using Ascend’s comprehensive metadata, determines the root cause, creates a detailed GitHub issue with relevant code snippets, raises an incident with PagerDuty, and simultaneously sends a contextual notification to the appropriate Slack channel—all without human intervention.
Extensible Through Industry-Standard Integrations
Custom Agents seamlessly connect to external systems through Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, enabling teams to integrate with their existing toolchain using just a few lines of configuration. Whether sending notifications through Slack, creating incident reports in PagerDuty, managing GitHub issues and pull requests, or connecting to any MCP-compatible service, custom agents operate as natural extensions of existing workflows.
“The power isn’t just in the intelligence—it’s in how easily these agents integrate with the tools teams already use,” added Cody Peterson, Product Manager at Ascend. “We’re not asking teams to abandon their workflows; we’re making them dramatically more efficient.”
Beyond Incident Response: Governance and Optimization
While incident response represents an immediate use case, custom agents excel at proactive data operations. Teams can deploy agents that enforce coding style guides or automatically optimize pipeline performance based on usage patterns. Furthermore, teams can fine-tune Ascend’s built-in agents with organization-specific business logic and context using Custom Rules. This flexibility transforms agents from reactive tools into proactive members of the data engineering team.
Custom Agents are now available to all Ascend.io customers as part of the Agentic Data Engineering platform.
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