Impact Assessment | Kada Knowledge Base

K can help you automatically conduct impact assessments to assess the impact of changes to data items and identify impacted users. Common scenarios where an impact assessment would be helpful include:

Checking which data assets and users are impacted by a potential change
Assessing the testing effort required for a change
Quickly verifying which data assets have been impacted by an incident or issue
Generating a list of users, data owners, or stewards of impacted data assets to contact
Data migration analysis

About the K Impact Assessment

The K impact assessment can be performed across different directions and levels:

Direction: Relative to the data asset, the direction you want to assess impact across the data lineage — e.g. Upstream vs Downstream
Assessment level: At what data level you want to conduct the impact assessment. Based on the type of data asset selected, there are 4 assessment levels:

Assessment level	Included in assessment	Description
Table level	Tables, Dataset Tables, Reports, Pipelines, ML Models	Performs a coarse grain assessment and returns all impacted assets at the table/report/pipeline level
Column level	Columns, Fields, Sheets	Performs a fine grain assessment and returns all impacted assets at the column/field level
User level	Users	Performs a user assessment and returns all data assets that a specific user has created or used
Collection bounded	Coarse grain assets within a collection instance	Performs a collection assessment and returns all table-level assets within the collection

How to run an impact assessment

Step 1 — Select impact assessment target

To assess a single data asset: go to the Data Profile page, click on the menu in the header, and select Assess Impact
To assess multiple data assets: create a list containing all the assets you want to assess, or select a collection instance — then open it and select Assess Impact from the menu

Step 2 — Configure impact assessment settings

Click the green New Impact Assessment button
- If the button is greyed out, the impact assessment target has not been confirmed yet
Confirm the assessment settings and click Next:
- Assessment Level: Table, Column, User, or Collection Bounded (options shown dynamically based on the asset type selected)
- Direction: Upstream or Downstream
Confirm the next level of assessment detail and click Run:
- Depth limit — for large assessments, start with a lower depth and increase if needed
- Expansion limit — the number of connected assets displayed per node, ranked by trust score
- Usage period
- Source limits (optional)

Step 3 — Check and access your impact assessment results

While running, the status displays as Amber. Once ready to review, it turns Green
You can view assessment settings from the results screen. Click … → Copy to new assessment to tweak settings and re-run
To Refresh an assessment, click … → Refresh — this re-runs with the same settings against the latest data
To re-run across a different time period, use Copy to new assessment and update the usage assessment date
Click on the row to open your impact assessment results

All users can view previously run impact assessments

If you run a historical impact assessment (e.g. 90day window for last year), the impact assessment will be based on the data lineage of the ecosystem that K has stored as at last year. This means if you have in the last year onboarded additional data sources, the historical impact assessment will not show these results as K has not stored the metadata.

Viewing impact assessment results

The default view shows results in list format, where you can:

Click the open button on any asset header to open its Data Profile in a new tab
Toggle between impacted users and impacted assets views — and filter by depth (number of hops from the starting object)
Change filters, download results, or adjust displayed columns
Download results via the download button, or access additional export options from the … menu
Click Save to preserve your current filter configuration for future visits
Click Close to return to the impact assessment history page

You can also switch to a visual Map view, which:

Automatically applies any filters set in the list view
Supports legend overlays — expand via the bottom icon
Includes a search function to locate specific nodes when the map is large
Can be exited at any time by clicking Close to return to the list view

Additional actions

There are four additional actions available from the menu

Action	Description
Assessment details	View the settings used for this assessment
Refresh assessment	Re-run with the latest data sources loaded to K
Impacted asset by user export	A list of all users and the impacted assets they use
Detailed lineage report	A detailed Excel export listing each connection row by row

Refreshing an impact assessment

When an impact assessment requires a refresh (e.g. due to archiving or a platform release), its status will show as Pending with a tooltip advising that a refresh is required.

To action this: click … on the assessment row and select Refresh assessment. You will be notified when the refreshed assessment is ready (if email notifications are configured).

💡 Related: See Lineage Mapper for visualising the data flows that underpin your impact assessments, and Collections for collection-bounded impact assessments.