Create Relationships

You can build a journey from its constituent components—and the dependencies between them—from the Relationships tab of the journey details.

Tip

Observability assesses a journey's sequence as events are received during an instance. See Define Instances for all instance behaviors.

Relationships overview

A journey represents a collection of components in your data estate that are responsible for creating a data analytic deliverable. With Observability, you can create journeys to monitor components—and the relationships between them.

Relationships provide insight into lineage and dependencies. For example, if an error occurs in a particular component, the relationships allow root cause analysis, impact analysis, and the ability to find potential upstream causes, so you can understand how downstream components might be affected.

Relationship types

Observability supports a dependency-based relationship type. For example:

• A batch pipeline depends on another batch pipeline because a deliverable moves between them.
• A batch pipeline depends on a dataset because the pipeline reads from the dataset.
• A dataset depends on a pipeline because the pipeline writes to the dataset.

How to create relationships

1. Use the drop-down in the menu to select a Project > select Journeys from the menu.
2. Select an existing journey from the list or create a new journey.

3. From the Relationships tab, add components to the journey.

   1. Click + Component.
   2. Optional. Use the Search to filter the component list.

   3. Select the components you want to include.

      Note

      The list shows components that already exist on the Components page (i.e. components that have been automatically or manually created within the project). A component can only be included in a journey once; those already included appear unavailable for selection.

   4. Click Add # components.

4. To rearrange components, select > hold > drag any component to a new location.

5. Create relationships between components.
   1. Hover your cursor over a component to display blue dots.
   2. Select and hold one of the blue dots, then draw a line to the destination component.
   3. Repeat to create more relationships.

The system saves your work automatically as you build the journey.

Use the Zoom tools to resize the journey. Click to open a component-type legend.

Remove components or relationships

Select any component or dependency, then click Remove or use your keyboard (Delete on Mac; Backspace on Windows).

To remove multiple components and/or entities at one time, press and hold Ctrl or Shift while you select each entity.

Note that there is no option to undo. A relationship or component that is removed would need to be readded to the journey with the steps above.

View component details

To see more details for a component—including its key and description—click View component details.

Click Edit to manage the component settings and expectations or Delete to remove the component from the project.

Warning

Deleting is permanent. See Delete Components for all outcomes.

Visual example in Observability