Glossary of terms

  • Updated
  • Actor – A dataset representing a business entity, for example, User, Account, or Document.
  • Alert – A message produced from a rule evaluation that interests a user. For example, an alert about the daily active user count dropping 20% below its 3-month average.
  • Analytic block (Block) – A building unit for composing arbitrarily complex analytical computations. Analytics offers a library of pre-defined block types.
  • Application – A logical grouping of objects for a particular business use case. Managing different use cases across teams or initiatives is an organizational convenience. Applications do not share any state among them.
  • Attribute – A column in an Analytics Dataset representing a qualitative or categorical property of the entity the dataset represents, for example, an age column in a user dataset or a device column in an event dataset.
  • Catalog – For an application, the catalog is the repository of all objects organized into folders. Users see parts of the catalog depending on their permissions. Each application has its own independent catalog structure.
  • Cohort – A group of actors sharing common properties or behaviors. For example, a cohort of enterprise users hosted two meetings within the first week of signup.
  • Connection – A pipeline between the Analytics service and your data warehouse. Analytics issues queries to your data warehouse through a connection. Every application has one connection.
  • Dashboard – A collection of visualizations organized in a grid view. You typically use dashboards to monitor commonly used operational metrics.
  • Data source – The enterprise repository of data. Typically, it is a data warehouse such as Snowflake or BigQuery.
  • Dataset – A tabular view (rows and columns) of data used for analytics. Datasets are logical views of data in your data source representing a business entity or activity, for example, User, Session, Ticket, Account, or Event.
  • Derived column – A calculated column of a dataset based on other columns of that dataset or related datasets. For example, a derived column of the User dataset called Engagement Cadence has daily, weekly, or monthly values for each user depending on their usage activity.
  • Derived Dataset – A dataset created by combining existing datasets (source or derived) to create a compound dataset.
  • Event stream – A dataset representing a stream of events, such as user interactions in a mobile app.
  • Event type (Event) – Represents values in an event stream dataset column that describes the event type.
  • Exploration – Provides analytical insights, such as retention, conversion, churn, and engagement. It is built using an exploration template and includes a query definition and a resulting visualization.
  • Folder – Contains objects that you can save with a name. Folders logically organize objects such as datasets, explorations, dashboards, and so on. Folders are hierarchical, and a folder can contain sub-folders.
  • Funnel – Maps website visitors' flow to specific funnel steps that result in conversions or signups.
  • Group – A collection of users organized together for a business function. You can use groups to control users' access to objects and application privileges.
  • Materialization – A query performance optimization technique to pre-compute certain calculations for faster query response times.
  • Measure – A column in an Analytics Dataset representing a quantitative measurement of business activity, such as the number of daily active users.
  • Metric – A calculation representing a business measurement, such as the average session duration, representing the average time users spend in a session. Analytics determines the dimensionality of metrics at the time of usage. For example, a report may look at the average session duration for a particular cohort or users and a certain period.
  • Notification – A notification is a message to a user about an alert triggered in the system. You receive notifications within the Analytics desktop browser or the Analytics Mobile application.
  • Organization – Represents the company that is a customer of Analytics.
  • Query – A query defines an analytical computation using SQL, NetScript, or templates. Executing a query produces results that you can visualize.
  • Rule – Defines one or more criteria for alert generation and the payload for generated alerts.
  • Sampling – A query performance optimization technique that uses a representative sample of data for computations instead of the entire data.
  • Schema – The organization or structure of a database.
  • Segment – A category for breaking down analysis. For example, you can break down a retention analysis by segments of user cohorts or attributes.
  • Source dataset – Represents a logical mapping to a table, view, or SQL query in the data warehouse.
  • Template – A pre-defined set of configurations for defining a particular object, such as an Exploration. Templates offer an easy way to author commonly used types of objects. Analytics offers templates for Explorations, Cohorts, Derived Columns, and Metrics.
  • User – A user is a person belonging to an organization that has access to the Analytics application.