Core concepts
A short glossary of the terms you will meet across the console and these docs. Skim it once and the rest of the documentation reads faster.
Account model #
How your account is organised and what events are attributed to.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Tenant | Your account: the top-level container that owns everything else. Members, apps, tokens, policies, and quotas all belong to a tenant. Most billing and access decisions are made at this level. |
| App | One site or product you measure. Events are attributed to the app they came from. An app can be enabled or disabled, and carries its own settings such as consent handling and session replay. |
| App ID (slug) |
The short, immutable identifier you choose when creating an app, for example
storefront. It is the appId the snippet sends on every beacon
and cannot be changed afterwards, so pick it deliberately.
|
| Environment |
Which deployment a beacon came from: production, staging,
development, or preview. You set it in the snippet so live
traffic stays separate from test traffic, and each environment can carry its own
ingest policy.
|
Sending events #
The credentials and rules that govern what reaches the receiver and how it is shaped.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Ingest token | A secret the snippet presents so the receiver knows the beacons are yours. You create, rotate, and revoke tokens per app in the console. A leaked token is revoked without touching your code. |
| Ingest policy | The per-environment ruleset the receiver applies to incoming beacons: sampling rate, retention, payload size caps, allowed origins, bot handling, and hard rate limits. It is how you control volume and cost without changing the SDK. |
| Custom dimension |
A typed field you define and attach to events, such as plan or
tenant_tier, so you can slice dashboards by your own business
attributes. Each dimension declares its type and can be marked required or PII.
|
Privacy & identity #
How Smartizy handles consent and who a session belongs to.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Consent |
A per-visitor state that decides whether the collector sends anything:
granted collects immediately, denied sends nothing, and
pending buffers until the visitor chooses. You set the starting value
with defaultConsent and update it when your cookie banner resolves.
|
| Visitor vs session | A visitor is one person across visits; a session is a single continuous visit that ends after a period of inactivity. One visitor can have many sessions. Dashboards distinguish the two so you can tell reach from engagement. |
| Release | An optional version tag, often a git SHA or build number, attached to every beacon. Tag releases so you can compare performance and error rates before and after a deploy. |
Reading the data #
One toggle shapes nearly every dashboard, so it is worth knowing up front.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Humans, Bots, All | The audience toggle on the scope bar. Humans excludes detected bot and crawler traffic and is the default for measuring real experience. Bots isolates that traffic, and All shows everything combined. Switching it re-scopes the whole page. |
With the vocabulary in hand, the Quickstart walks you through creating an app and seeing your first events. To understand the scope bar that drives every dashboard, see The scope bar.