Dependency Walker

Visually trace resource dependencies through the graph, identify critical paths, and find single points of failure.

Overview

The Dependency Walker provides an interactive interface for exploring resource dependencies in the knowledge graph. Start from any resource and walk through its connections, expanding nodes to explore deeper relationships. The walker highlights critical paths, cycles, and single points of failure in real time.

Interactive traversal

The Dependency Walker provides a visual, interactive graph traversal experience:

  • Start from any resource -- search for a resource or select from the graph
  • Expand/collapse -- click to expand a resource's dependencies or collapse them
  • Direction control -- traverse upstream, downstream, or both directions
  • Depth control -- limit traversal depth to control complexity
  • Filter by type -- show or hide specific relationship types
  • Search within walk -- find specific resources in the expanded tree
# Programmatic dependency walk
POST /api/v1/graph/walk
{
  "start_resource_id": "i-abc123",
  "direction": "both",
  "max_depth": 5,
  "relationship_types": ["DEPENDS_ON", "CONTAINS", "ATTACHED_TO"]
}

Critical path analysis

The walker automatically identifies critical paths in the dependency chain:

  • Longest path -- the deepest dependency chain from the starting resource
  • Shortest path to critical -- the shortest route from a resource to a critical service
  • All paths -- enumerate all possible dependency paths between two resources
  • Bottleneck detection -- resources that appear in many dependency paths

Single points of failure

The walker analyzes the graph for single points of failure (SPoFs):

SPoF typeDescription
No redundancyResource with only one upstream dependency
High betweennessResource that sits on the most dependency paths
Shared dependencyMultiple critical services depend on a single resource
Leaf dependencyLeaf resources that are the sole dependency for a path
SPoF remediation
Each identified single point of failure includes a risk assessment and remediation recommendations, such as adding redundancy, implementing circuit breakers, or rearchitecting the dependency chain.

Exporting results

Walk results can be exported in multiple formats:

  • JSON -- machine-readable dependency tree for further analysis
  • Mermaid -- diagram of the walked dependency chain
  • CSV -- tabular export of all dependencies with hop count
  • Report -- formatted report with SPoF analysis and recommendations