Getting Started

What is in this guide?

This guide will walk you through the process for creating your first MetaRouter cluster, generating events from your web properties, sending them to your MetaRouter cluster, and ultimately to your integrations.

Who is this guide for?

This guide is intended for anyone interested in learning more about how to send customer and user data generated by your websites and apps to your integrations via MetaRouter Enterprise. Primarily, marketing and analytics teams will be responsible for determining what events to track, and engineering teams will be responsible for the initial implementation on websites or applications.

Overview

MetaRouter Enterprise is a platform designed to streamline your entire customer data infrastructure and give you maximum control over how your data is produced and sent to advertising tools, product analytics platforms, data science tools, and more. We provide SDKs that are ready to track any actions that your users are taking on your app and identify them for purposes such as user journey tracking and marketing attribution. Through MetaRouter, you will also have control over what user data you send along to partners on an integration-by-integration basis through our Playbook configurations.

In order to get started with Enterprise, you will need to align your development team with your analytics and/or marketing teams. Engineering teams typically help set up private instances of MetaRouter, install SDKs, and code events into websites and apps, while marketing and analytics teams will help determine what behavior should be tracked on a website or within an app.

Here are the steps to successfully setting up MetaRouter Enterprise:

Establish your MetaRouter cluster
Determine the events you would like to track
Install an SDK & code events into your website/app
Connect your cluster to the UI and set up your first pipeline
Verify that events are being sent to MetaRouter and your integration

Establishing Your MetaRouter Cluster

Unlike other eventing tools that rely on multi-tenant architecture, when you set up an account with MetaRouter, you are also creating an entirely new architecture designed to route your events from your properties to servers that host a unique instance of MetaRouter, where those events with be transformed and sent to integrations based on your preferences. This means that you will need to contact us to create your own private MetaRouter cluster before getting started. We'll handle most of the hard work in most cases; you will just need to let us know when you want to get started, and which type of install- Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)- you prefer.

"Our Cloud" vs. "Your Cloud"

In most cases, Our Cloud (MetaRouter-Hosted Platform as a Service) is the best solution for our customers. We will create a new MetaRouter cluster(s) on our servers that is dedicated solely to your organization and provide resources to allow you to control the data pipelines. This cluster will contain all the services you need to start sending events from your property to your integrations.

Your Cloud is an option for those who prefer maximum data privacy. With this option, MetaRouter will not have control over access to your data processing infrastructure. Instead, you will maintain full ownership over your MetaRouter cluster(s), and only provide us access by updating Kubernetes RBAC roles. Because of the restrictive nature of this install and lower service level agreements we offer for it, we only recommend this for organizations that require the maximum degree of privacy and understand how to use Kubernetes effectively.

Before continuing on, please let us know if you require a "Your Cloud" install and we will walk you through that process. It will differ from the rest of this guide.

Setting up on "Our Cloud"

Once you know you would like to set up using "Our Cloud", we will get to work developing your data routing infrastructure. We will need primary contacts for those who are managing the setup, install and maintenance of your MetaRouter cluster(s).

Once your cluster is created, the next step is setting up the SDKs to use first-party DNS records. The two pieces of information you will want to take note of are:

Your dedicated subdomain for our platform. We will provide you with a CNAME-able record that will allow for you to have the same domain for your web properties as well as our data processing cluster.
A place to store the Javascript SDK. Once your subdomain is pointing to the clusters dedicated for your organization, we will generate a web SDK to help implement tracking on your websites. This will need to leverage the CDNs you currently use in order to be loaded as a 1st-Party property and maximize the benefits of the MetaRouter platform.

We will also need to know which integrations you would like to set up initially. You can always add new integrations as long as they are available in our library of available integrations.

A Note for Partners

MetaRouter's data processing architecture is highly configurable to provide real-time data processing for any scale. If you are a partner of MetaRouter, we can help with crafting the underlying architecture to maximize cost efficiency or data privacy for your individual clients. We're happy to can chat with you to determine the best route for your needs.