Glossary of Terms
Actor
An actor is a dataset that represents a business entity e.g. User, Account, Document.
Alert
An alert is a message that is produced as a result of a rule evaluation producing something of interest to a user e.g. alerting on daily active user count dropping 20% below its 3-month average.
Analytic Block a.k.a Block
An analytic block, or block for short, is a building unit for composing arbitrarily complex analytical computations. NetSpring offers a library of pre-defined block types.
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.
Attribute
An attribute is a column in a NetSpring Dataset that represents a qualitative or categorical property of the entity the dataset represents e.g. an age column in a user dataset or device column in an event dataset.
Catalog
The catalog for an application 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 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.
Connection
A connection is a “pipe” between the NetSpring service and your data warehouse. NetSpring issues queries to your data warehouse through a connection. Every application has one connection.
Dashboard
A dashboard is a collection of visualizations organized in a grid view. Dashboards are typically used for monitoring of commonly used operational metrics.
Data Source
A data source is the enterprise repository of data - typically a data warehouse such as Snowflake or BigQuery.
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.
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.
Derived Dataset
A derived dataset is a dataset that is created by combining existing datasets (either source or derived) to create a compound dataset.
Event Stream
An event stream is a dataset that represents a stream of events e.g. user interactions in a mobile app.
Event Type a.k.a. Event
Event type, or event for short, represents values in a column of an event stream dataset that describes the type of the event.
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.
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.
Funnel
A Funnel is used to map the flow of website visitors to a set of specific funnel steps that result in conversions or signups.
Group
A group is a collection of users organized together for a business function. Groups are used to control access to objects and application privileges for users.
Materialization
Materialization is a query performance optimization technique to pre-compute certain calculations for faster query response times.
Measure
A measure is a column in a NetSpring Dataset that represents a quantitative measurement of a business activity e.g. a count of daily active users.
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.
Notification
A notification is a message to a user about an alert that has triggered in the system. Notifications are received within the NetSpring desktop browser application or through the NetSpring Mobile application.
Organization
An organization in NetSpring represents the company that is a customer of NetSpring.
Query
A query is a definition of an analytical computation expressed using SQL, NetScript or templates. Executing a query produces results that can be visualized.
Rule
A rule defines one or more criteria for alert generation and the payload for generated alerts.
Sampling
Sampling is a query performance optimization technique that uses a representative sample of data for computations instead of the entire data.
Schema
A Schema is the organization or structure for a database.
Segment
A segment is a category for breaking down analysis by e.g. breaking down a retention analysis by segments of user cohorts or attributes.
Source Dataset
A source dataset is a dataset that represents a logical mapping to a table, view, or SQL query in the data warehouse.
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. NetSpring offers templates for Explorations, Cohorts, Derived Columns, and Metrics.
User
A user is a person belonging to an oraganization that has access to the NetSpring application.