Reporting

Why does a dependency report not automatically include a new depending asset?

Reports are query-based. This means that the Dependency Report depicts just assets and links which result from a specific query.

When a report is saved, only the location of the resulting assets of the query, and the query are saved. To inspect the query, click on the Filters tab in the left sidebar. For example, if a add neighbors” query is executed on a node, all neighbors of this node are displayed. If another neighbor is added to this node in the future, it will be displayed dynamically. However, if on the same node a query is executed to show a specific neighbor, the newly added neighbor is not rendered automatically.

Example: Assume a service is running on a virtual machine. This underlying virtual machine may change over time. Depending on how the query was formulated, the virtual machine might be displayed or not. If the query was formulated to "add neighbors" of the service in question, the report will automatically show the new virtual machine. However, if the virtual machine was added to the report explicitly in the query bar (by name), it will not update when the service is running on a new virtual machine.

In this dependency report the neighbors of "test-instance" were added as well as explicitly the asset "test-vm-2". If the "runs on"-link of "test-instance" is now changed to "test-vm-2", the asset "test-vm" will disappear as it is neither explicitly added nor a neighbor of "test-instance".