Pentaho offers you the ability to visualize the end-to-end flow of your data across PDI transformations and jobs, providing you with valuable insights to help you maintain meaningful data. This ability to track your data from source systems to target applications allows you take advantage of third-party tools, such as Meta Integration Technology (MITI) and yEd, to track and view specific data.
Once lineage tracking is enabled, PDI will generate a GraphML file every time you run a transformation.
You can then open this file using a third-party tool, such as yEd, to view a tree diagram of
the data. By parsing through and teasing out the different parts of the graph, you can gain an
end-to-end view into a specific element of data from origin to target. This ability can aid
you in both data lineage and impact analysis:
- Data lineage provides the ability to discover the origins of an element of data and describes the sequence of jobs and transformations which have occurred up to the point of the request for the lineage information.
- Impact analysis is the reverse flow of information which can be used to trace the use and consumption of a data item, typically for the purpose of managing change or assessing and auditing access.