How to show how applications connect with Yantra Studio
Record the integrations between applications as modelled connections, then read them back through the views that depend on them.
When this is useful
- You have inherited a landscape and nobody can say what talks to what.
- An integration is being retired and you need to know who is on the other end of it.
- A portfolio review needs a picture of the estate rather than of one system.
Before you start
- The applications on a page as shapes. This guide assumes they exist already — see how to create a solution architecture diagram if not.
- Some knowledge of the integrations. Where you are unsure, record what you know and mark the rest; an incomplete map that says so beats a confident wrong one.
Step 1: Draw the integration as a connector
Insert a connector between the two applications. Direction matters: draw it from the caller to the called, because that is the direction dependency questions are asked in.
Page ▸ Connector
Step 2: Say what the connection is
Label the connector with what actually flows — an API call, a nightly file, a shared table. A landscape where every line is unlabelled tells you that things are connected and nothing more.
Step 3: Read the landscape back
Platform Lens presents the diagram through the platforms its components belong to, which is the portfolio view rather than the box-level one.
Impact Analysis answers the specific question — what depends on this — by following the connectors you have recorded.
Arch ▸ Platform LensData ▸ Impact Analysis
What happens next
The connections become the input to every dependency question the model can answer. Impact analysis, lineage and the architecture views all read the same relationships.
From here, record the risks that sit on specific integrations — a nightly file with no retry is a risk that belongs on the connector, not in a spreadsheet.
Example
Twelve applications, thirty-one integrations, recorded over two afternoons of interviews.
The value arrived a month later, when a proposed decommission turned out to have four downstream consumers rather than the one everybody remembered.
Tips
- Record uncertainty rather than omitting it. A connector labelled "believed, unconfirmed" is a to-do; a missing connector is an error nobody will find.
- Draw the direction of the dependency, not the direction of the data. A service that reads a database depends on it even though the data flows the other way.
Limitations
- Nothing discovers integrations for you here. The map is as complete as the interviews behind it — the exception is an architecture imported from code, which is a different guide.
- Platform Lens depends on components carrying a platform.