Service Dependencies

The Dependencies feature provides powerful visualization and analysis of service relationships across your infrastructure. Understand blast radius, identify single points of failure, and predict cascade failures before they impact your users.

Overview

Modern applications rarely exist in isolation. They depend on databases, APIs, message queues, and other services to function. Understanding these relationships is critical for incident response, architecture planning, and reliability engineering. Pulsimo's dependency mapping transforms implicit relationships into explicit, visual, actionable knowledge.

Visual Mapping

Interactive graph showing all service relationships with real-time status updates

Impact Analysis

Understand blast radius when services fail and predict cascade failures

Critical Path

Identify services on the critical path to user functionality

SPOF Detection

Find single points of failure automatically and mitigate risks

Creating Dependencies

Map relationships between your services in a few simple steps:

  1. 1

    Click "Dependencies" in the sidebar

  2. 2

    Click "Add Dependency" button

  3. 3

    Select Source Service (the service that depends on...)

    Example: "Web Frontend"

  4. 4

    Select Target Service (the service it depends on)

    Example: "API Gateway"

  5. 5

    Choose Dependency Type and save

Dependency Types

STRONG

Source cannot function without target. If target goes down, source is immediately impacted.

Example: Web Frontend → API Gateway (frontend is useless without API)

WEAK

Source is degraded but functional without target. Some features may be unavailable.

Example: Web App → Analytics Service (app works but no analytics)

MONITORING

Just tracking the relationship for documentation purposes. No functional dependency.

Example: Service A → Service B (same team, related but independent)

Dependency Graph Features

The interactive dependency graph provides powerful visualization capabilities:

Nodes

Circles represent your services, sized by importance

→

Edges

Arrows show dependencies between services

Real-Time

Service status updates instantly on the graph

Status Indicators on Graph

Green

Service UP

Red

Service DOWN

Yellow

Critical path

Orange

Single point of failure

Common Use Cases

🔍 Incident Response: When a service goes down, instantly see which other services are impacted to prioritize recovery efforts.

📋 Maintenance Planning: Identify all dependent services before taking a service offline for maintenance.

🏗️ Architecture Documentation: Maintain a living diagram of your infrastructure that updates automatically with service health.