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An environment is a container within your organization for the two building blocks of a governed data experience:
  • Packages — versioned semantic models, plus the reports, dashboards, and data apps built on them.
  • Connections — secure, managed links to the databases and warehouses those packages read from.
Environments are stable, governed resource configurations. They change deliberately — through modeling and publishing — and are the foundation your team analyzes against, not where analysis happens. Analysis happens in workspaces, which consume the models an environment publishes.

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Where an Environment Fits

Two properties do most of the work:
  • Connections are shared. Configure a data source once and every package in the environment can use it. Credible indexes each connection’s schema so AI agents can discover tables and suggest models. See Connect a Database.
  • Packages are versioned. Every publish creates a new immutable version. Pin one as latest, or publish unpinned to test before promoting. See Publishing.

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Common Patterns

Teams typically organize environments around a department (finance, HR, RevOps — each owning its own data and models), around delivery stages (dev, staging, production, plus private per-developer sandboxes), or a hybrid of the two. See Environments & Packages Best Practices for these patterns in detail.

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Your Credentials Stay Secure

An admin stores database credentials in the environment once; no one needs to handle them again:
  • No local credentials. Developers and modelers SSO into Credible and use the environment’s managed connections — nothing is stored on their machines.
  • All access is proxied. Every request to the underlying data — from an IDE, the in-app agent, a workspace, or an API — goes through Credible, never directly to your database.
  • Access-controlled and audit-logged. Every request is checked against the environment’s ACLs and recorded in an audit log.
This makes Credible a secure perimeter around your data — grant analysts, partners, or applications governed access to your models without ever exposing a credential.

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Environment Roles

Grant access to an environment with one of three roles, assigned to users or groups. A role applies to every package in the environment; you can also grant narrower access on an individual package. For the full permission model — organization roles, groups, and package-level sharing — see Users & Groups.

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Environments vs. Workspaces

Environment

The stable foundation. Holds governed packages and connections. Changes through deliberate modeling and publishing. Managed by admins and modelers.

Workspace

Where work happens. Team members chat with data, build reports and data apps, and explore & iterate on published models. Consumes what environments serve. See the Credible App.

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Next Steps

First connect your data, then pick how you want to build:

Connect a Database

Add a managed connection to your environment

Build in the App

Build models with the agent in your browser — no setup

Local Development

Build in your IDE with your preferred coding agent