Key concepts and terms

mPulse and industry-shared terms you'll want to understand:

• Akamai Control Center. The integrated, browser-based interface for ​Akamai​'s
  products, services, and platform. The ​Akamai Control Center​ delivers intelligent
  tools for site and stream management, diagnostics, and collaboration to help businesses
  thrive in the hyperconnected world. Accessible via web, mobile, and API, the ​Akamai Control Center​ makes it easy for businesses to configure their ​Akamai​
  services, monitor performance, analyze traffic, and resolve end-user issues in real time,
  from any device, anywhere.

• API key. An auto-generated value that uniquely identifies your site's data
  (beacons), making it possible for you to analyze different parts of your website
  independently.

  • Note: An API Key is not a secret, and should not be considered sensitive. It is used in conjunction with the domain name (among other things) to determine where beacons are stored. API keys need to be included in your site's HTML, which is publicly readable.

• app. The mPulse configuration used to get performance data from your website or
  native application into mPulse for data analysis.

• beacon. An invisible network request (HTTP or HTTPS) that contains a mass of
  performance data and other page-load characteristics. All of this factual information is
  sitting in the beacon as either HTTP headers or as part of the request's query string. In
  the web performance community, a beacon is commonly called RUM or real user measurement
  data.

• boomerang. An open-source JavaScript library that measures the page load and other
  performance characteristics experienced by users. mPulse is built on boomerang.js (open
  source JavaScript code) to measure the performance of your site from a visitor's
  perspective.

• config.js. The JavaScript file that contains all of the items in your mPulse app
  configuration (for example, API key, domain name, page group rules, custom timers and
  metrics), and determines what information about your visitors' experience is sent to the
  mPulse beacon logs.

• custom dimension. In mPulse, any non-performance data about your visitors that help to
  categorize page views into useful segments for analysis.

• custom metric. In mPulse, any measurable user-defined, value that refers to a business
  goal, or key performance indicator (KPI) such as revenue, conversion, order per minute or
  order count.

• custom timer. In mPulse, any measurable user-defined, value in a web page such as page
  load, back-end time or front-end time.

• domain name. The fully qualified domain name (FQDN) used to identify the server (domain)
  hosting your site or service, for example, example.com or
  example.edgesuite.net.

• mPulse. ​Akamai​'s real user measurement solution that maps user behavior to business
  performance as it's happening.

• mPulse behavior. A property configuration behavior in Property Manager that lets you enable
  mPulse on your website.

• mPulse collector. A server that collects, processes, and stores mPulse beacons, and then sends
  performance data back to the mPulse dashboards for analysis. If ​Akamai​
  delivers your web traffic, an edge server performs these tasks.

• mPulse snippet. JavaScript code that defines the mPulse inline frame (iFrame) and starts
  the retrieval and loading of the boomerang code.

• multivariate test. A test (commonly called an A/B test) that lets you track multiple versions
  of a web page, server names, data centers, or any item that's not directly related to
  performance and does not require a custom timer or a custom metric.

• onload event. A browser event that's triggered when a page on your site fully loads all
  of the content on the page.

• onunload event. A browser event that's triggered when a visitor leaves a page on your site,
  for example, they click a link or close their browser.

• page group. A collection of URLs that represent a single logical web page such as
  search results, log in, and account summary.

• permissions. Permissions (for example, read, write, and delete) can be applied to any
  object or folder, within mPulse, that you own such as deleting an app.

• privileges. mPulse has standard administrative roles (privileges) that can extend the
  management of certain functionality to both business and technical staff. These privileges
  include:

  • Tenant administrator can create, edit, and delete tenants

  • App Administrator can create, edit, and delete apps and assign user privileges

  • User administrator can create, edit, and delete user accounts

• Property Manager. Property Manager lets you determine how you want our edge servers to handle
  and process requests, responses, and objects served over the ​Akamai​
  platform.

• real user measurement (RUM). A method of collecting data directly from your a user's browser and device
  as they interact with your site.

• tag manager. A management service that embeds a single JavaScript file into a web page's
  HTML.

• tenant. A segregated area within an mPulse environment. You can think of it as a
  domain on a network. Tenants are not aware of each other.

See also the Cloud Computing Glossary and Community.