Intelligent Lineage & Change Management

K's lineage and change management capabilities are two sides of the same coin. Lineage gives you a map of how data flows across your organisation — and change management uses that map to detect when something shifts, scope the impact, and notify the right people automatically.

This page covers both:

Intelligent Lineage

K provides context and trust to your data items by helping you understand the lineage and relationships between them. You can see where your data item sources data from, where it flows to, and how it joins to other data items.

Lineage crosses different item types — from tables to reports — across different sources. K automatically generates lineage across these items. Where it can't, lineage can be manually added via the UI or API.

Object types are colour-coded on the lineage map:

• Tables/Columns — Blue

• Reports and Sheets — Orange

• Datasets and Dataset Tables/Fields — Green

• Pipelines, ML Models, and Files — Red

About Lineage Swim Lanes

In the new Lineage Experience, the lineage map has been structured into swimlanes.

The benefits of using swim lanes include:

• Ability to easily see all the data assets in that lineage level

• Deep dive into each lineage level and quickly select data assets via the lineage map

• Choose which data assets appear in the swimlane

  • Hold Alt/Option and click on the swimlane pop out panel appear. On this panel you can manually toggle what you'd like to make visible or hide

Navigating the Lineage Chart

Access Lineage from any Data Profile Page by clicking the Lineage tab. The chart reads left to right — items on the left are upstream (providing data to) items on the right.

1. Items with a + sign have expandable lineage — click to expand

2. Click automated links (full lines) to see the code or pipeline connecting two items

3. The current target you are viewing is highlighted in Blue

Display Options

There are more display options in the Map view toolbar. Options include:

1. Show reference: Reference objects can be toggled to display on or off from the map

2. Show active only: You can toggle deleted items on or off from the map. Lineage for deleted items will have this toggle turned on.

Reference objects are assets and sources detected by K that have not been onboarded to K.

Accessing More Detail

Click any item on the map to open a side panel with details — tags, collections, description, Trust Score, type, and classification. You can update information directly from this panel.

Click on a specific link (the line connecting two items) to see the code or pipeline joining them:

Advanced Lineage Filters

When navigating large lineage maps, use the advanced filter to selectively show only the assets you are interested in. Toggle the filter between INCLUDE / OR logic to refine results.

After you confirm your filter options, items filtered will remain visible while those not selected will appear faded.

Lineage Search

Sometimes there can be a large amount of data assets in a lineage and it can be difficult to locate a specific data asset.

There are two ways you can easily search the lineage map:

1. Search through the entire lineage map via the main search option

2. At the specific lineage level

Download and Print the Lineage Map

To download an image of the lineage map, click on the Download icon.

Prior to downloading the lineage map, try highlighting the key data assets you want to emphasise. For large complex lineage maps, consider highlighting the data assets that are not required to reduce visual noise.

Updating Lineage Manually

If lineage is missing for an asset, you can add it manually from the Data Profile Page.

1. Open the Lineage tab on the Data Profile Page

2. Click on the asset you want to edit — the sidebar will appear

3. Click Edit Lineage in the sidebar

4. Use the form to add Upstream or Downstream assets

Change Management

Once you understand how your data flows, K puts that map to work — automatically detecting changes across the data estate, assessing their impact, and routing notifications to the right people. This closes the loop between lineage visibility and operational response.

The two features that power this are covered in detail in their own pages:

Data Change Timeline

K automatically detects structural and metadata changes to data assets and records them chronologically in each Data Profile Page's Timeline tab. This gives data owners and governance managers a clear audit trail of what changed, when, and by whom — making it straightforward to investigate incidents, audit governance decisions, and support impact assessments.

→ Data Change Timeline

Notify Impacted Stakeholders

When a change occurs, K uses lineage and usage data to identify who is downstream of the affected asset — and automatically notifies them via K's notification system, MS Teams, Slack, or email. Notifications include a direct link to the affected asset's Data Profile Page and the relevant change event.

→ Notify Impacted Stakeholders