Terms and Concepts

The following are key terms and concepts used in the Analytics product. See this Glossary of Terms for a comprehensive list of all terms.

Application​

An application is a logical grouping of objects for a particular business use case. It is an organizational convenience to manage different use cases across teams or initiatives. Applications do not share any state among them.

Data Source​

A data source is the enterprise repository of data - typically a data warehouse such as Snowflake or BigQuery.

Connection​

A connection is a “pipe” between the Analytics service and your data warehouse. Analytics issues queries to your data warehouse through a connection. Every application has one connection.

Dataset​

A dataset is a tabular view (rows and columns) of data used for analytics. Datasets are logical views of data in your data source that represents a business entity or activity e.g. User, Session, Ticket, Account, Event.

Event Stream​

An event stream is a dataset that represents a stream of events e.g. user interactions in a mobile app.

Actor​

An actor is a dataset that represents a business entity e.g. User, Account, Document.

Exploration​

An exploration is a report that provides some analytical insight e.g. retention, conversion, churn, engagement. An exploration is built using an exploration template. An exploration includes a query definition and a resulting visualization.

Template​

A template is a pre-defined set of configurations for defining a particular object such as an Exploration. Templates offer an easy way to quickly author commonly used types of objects. Analytics offers templates for Explorations, Cohorts, Derived Columns, Metrics, and Datasets.

Dashboard​

A dashboard is a collection of visualizations organized in a grid view. Dashboards are typically used for monitoring of commonly used operational metrics.

Cohort​

A cohort is a group of actors that share some common properties or behaviors e.g. a cohort of enterprise users who hosted 2 meetings within the first week of signup.

Derived Column​

A derived column is a calculated column of a dataset that is based on other columns of that dataset or related datasets e.g. a derived column of the User dataset called Engagement Cadence that has Daily, Weekly or Monthly values for each user depending on their usage activity.

Metric​

A metric is a calculation that represents a business measurement e.g. Average Session Duration that represents the average time users spend in a session. The dimensionality of metrics is determined at the time of usage e.g. a report may look at Average Session Duration for a particular cohort or users and a certain time period.

Folder​

A folder is a container of objects that can be saved with a name. Folders are used to logically organize objects such as datasets, explorations, dashboards etc. Folders are hierarchical i.e. a folder can contain sub-folders. Folders can be secured by users and groups.

Catalog​

The catalog for an application is the repository of all metadata objects organized into folders. Users see parts of the catalog depending on their permissions.