Overview

Lineage allows you to visualize the complete lifecycle of your data, from its origin to its destination.

A fully-fledged lineage can notably help your team with:

Root cause analysis: identify where an issue might have originated from by looking at the upstream dependencies of your asset.
Business impact assessment: spot which teams might be impacted by an issue by looking at downstream dependencies of your asset.
Knowledge sharing: make your data lifecycle easy to understand for any new joiner on the team.
Monitoring coverage: ensure critical assets that feed a lot of other assets are being properly monitored.

Navigate the Lineage

To access the lineage view of an asset:

Click the Data Catalog entry on the sidebar of your Sifflet application
Search for your asset of interest
Click its card on the Data Catalog results list
Once on the asset page, go to the Lineage tab.

Lineage Node

Lineage node tiles contain details about the asset's:

Technology
Type
Fully qualified name: currently available for Tables & Views assets and declared assets
Name
Health status: currently available for Tables & Views assets
Number of direct upstream and downstream assets

Click a lineage node tile to open up a side panel containing more information about the asset.

Click the downward arrow to open up the list of dataset fields.

Actions

Expand Nodes

Click the + button on either sides of a lineage node to display the linked tables, either upstream or downstream.

📘
Tip - Bulk Expand Nodes
By holding the SHIFT key when clicking the + button on your lineage node, you can bulk expand nodes by two additional levels.

Show Asset Fields

Click the arrow on the right of the lineage node to see its fields and types.

Lineage Node Show Fields — Click the Arrow to Show Fields

Lineage Node Shown Fields — Lineage Node After Showing Fields

Show Field-Level Lineage

By default, the links are at table level. To display the field-level lineage between two tables, you need to display fields on those two tables by clicking the right arrow on the right of both lineage nodes or using the Show/Hide all fields button of the toolbar.

Lineage Side Panel

Clicking a lineage node tile opens up a side panel containing more information about the asset.

The top of lineage side panels contain details about the asset's:

Technology
Type
Fully qualified name: currently available for Tables & Views assets and declared assets
Name

It also allows you to perform various actions on your assets such as: visit the asset details page, see the SQL query associated with the asset, preview the first rows of your Tables & Views assets.

The below section contains more details about your asset:

Sifflet source name and last refresh date
Description, which can be automatically extracted from your source and/or manually edited by your team on Sifflet
Tags
Business terms
Domains
Owners
Data usage (only Tables & Views, Dashboards)
Time windows & offset (only Tables & Views)

Toolbar

The toolbar enables you to use additional features.

Filter

Click the funnel icon and tick the Fields with links only to only display the fields that are linked to others.

Undo

Click the bended arrow icon to go back to the previous view after, for instance, expanding some nodes.

Refresh

Click the rounded arrow icon to go back to the original lineage view.

Show/Hide all fields

Click the up and down arrows to show or hide all fields of displayed lineage nodes.

Explore mode ON/OFF

If you have a view with an overwhelming number of tables and fields, navigating the lineage to understand dependencies can be tricky. You can focus on a given table or field by:

pressing the discover button on the top left OR holding the Control key on your keyboard
then hover the data asset you want to highlight

Lineage

Overview

Navigate the Lineage