Impact Analysis

Overview

Impact analysis shows you every service affected by a change to a given service. Select a service and see its full dependency tree — upstream (who calls me) and downstream (who do I call).

Using impact analysis

1. Navigate to the Architecture view
2. Click a service node
3. Open the Blast Radius tab in the detail panel

The impact view shows:

• Affected services — every service in the dependency chain
• Depth — how many hops away each affected service is
• Direction — upstream (callers), downstream (callees), or both
• Severity — based on connection type and depth

Depth control

Impact analysis supports configurable depth (1–7 hops). Deeper traversal reveals indirect dependencies that may not be obvious:

• Depth 1 — Direct dependencies only
• Depth 3 — Typical blast radius for most changes
• Depth 7 — Full transitive closure (may be noisy for large graphs)

API access

Query impact programmatically via the REST API:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $ARCANON_API_KEY" \
  "https://api.arcanon.dev/api/v1/graphql" \
  -d '{"query": "{ impact(serviceId: \"svc-id\", depth: 3, direction: \"both\") { ... } }"}'

Or via the MCP server:

get_impact(service_name="payments-api", depth=3, direction="downstream")