Overview

MetaRouter's UI is built to empower your organization with the ability to control data sent to your vendors and provide parameter-by-parameter instructions for adding to, dropping, or transforming event payloads after they are ingested into the MetaRouter platform but before reaching your vendors.

Prerequisites

Key Definitions

Before you dive into the UI, there are a few key concepts you need to understand:

Clusters

A Cluster represents the hardware that the MetaRouter platform is installed upon- specifically, the servers within a region your Cloud Provider offers. The MetaRouter Platform can be installed within multiple Clusters to provide better resiliency and speed for data collection, which we can provide guidance for based on your requirements.

Because the MetaRouter platform is designed to be a single-tenant, private data infrastructure, a Cluster is built independent of the UI but can easily be connected to the UI so you can deploy your Integrations and Pipelines, which we discuss below.

Pipelines

A Pipeline represents data originating from a single source and a set of Integrations that should receive data from that source. Pipelines are designated by a unique writeKey and should be deployed within your Cluster, as well as specified within the UI. Typically these are designated by:

The source of the data- web, iOS/Android app, or server.
Environment- dev, staging, production, etc.

For example, a Pipeline could contain your website's production data, or your iOS app's staging environment.

Integrations

An Integration consumes data from a Pipeline and forwards that data to its specific destination (whether that's Facebook, your data warehouse, an analytics tool, etc.). Each Integration can be configured with specific transformations that allow for fine grain control of your data inside the MetaRouter platform.

When you set up an Integration for the first time, you must let us know. We will install a service inside of your Cluster that will handle the actual forwarding of an event to your Integration. For example, if you set up the MetaRouter platform, and after the fact your marketing team wishes to replace Facebook's pixel with a MetaRouter Integration, you would need to let us know.

Integrations in the UI contain parameter-by-parameter instructions for how to handle events sent to a specific vendor, and give you the option to:

Send and transform a parameter for all events with Global Configs. These are typically API keys, Secrets, Account IDs, and other credentials required for a vendor to accept an event.
Send and transform a parameter for a specific event we see with Event Configs. These are parameters included for specific events such as those generated through page, call, identify, and other event types.
Designate how to handle parameters sent to MetaRouter but not specified by Global Configs or Event Configs. This represents a catch-all, where you can either instruct us to pass any additional parameters we receive to your vendor, drop unspecified parameters, and/or transform parameters according to general instructions you set.

When setting up Integrations, there are additional definitions you should be aware of to help you apply your desired event transforms. You can find those definitions in Configuring Integrations.

Once you have reviewed the above definitions, head over to our Quick Start Guide to get started.