Blast radius analysis

Blast radius analysis is Dependra’s core intelligence feature. It answers the question: “If this system goes down, what else breaks?”

How it works

When you trigger a blast radius analysis on any application or component, Dependra:

1. Traverses the dependency graph starting from the selected node.
2. Follows outgoing dependencies to find all directly and transitively affected systems.
3. Applies your filters to control which dependency types and modes are included.
4. Maps to business impact by connecting affected applications to their capabilities and audiences.

The result is a complete picture of technical and business impact — from individual components all the way to the audiences that would be affected.

Controlling depth

You can limit the traversal depth to focus on immediate or near-term impact:

• Depth 1 — Only direct dependencies of the selected node.
• Depth 2 — Direct dependencies and their dependencies.
• Depth N — Continue traversing up to N hops away.
• Unlimited — Traverse the entire reachable graph.

Filtering

You can filter the traversal by:

• Dependency type — Only follow calls and reads dependencies, for example.
• Dependency mode — Only follow hard dependencies for worst-case analysis, or include soft and degraded for a broader picture.

Filters let you model different failure scenarios. A hard-dependency-only analysis shows what completely breaks. Including soft dependencies shows what degrades.

Reading the results

A blast radius result includes:

Impacted components

Every component that is transitively reachable through the dependency graph from the selected node.

Impacted applications

Every application that contains at least one impacted component.

Impacted capabilities

Business capabilities that are enabled by any impacted application. This connects technical failure to business function.

Impacted audiences

Audiences served by impacted capabilities. This tells you who is affected — internal users, external customers, partners, or operational teams.

Business impact mapping

The business impact layer connects your technical architecture to organizational value:

Application  ──enables──▶  Capability  ──serves──▶  Audience

• Capability — A business function that one or more applications enable. Capabilities carry a criticality tier and optional revenue impact and regulatory exposure flags.
• Audience — A group of people served by capabilities. Audiences have a type: internal, external, partner, or operational.

When a blast radius analysis identifies impacted applications, it automatically traces through to show which capabilities and audiences are affected — giving leadership and incident teams a business-level view of technical failures.

Use cases

• Incident response — Instantly understand the full scope of an outage.
• Change risk assessment — Before deploying, check what would break if the change introduces a failure.
• Architecture governance — Identify single points of failure and high-risk dependency chains.
• Capacity planning — Understand which systems are most critical and which audiences depend on them.