Key concepts
Now that you know what is Propel and how Propel works, it‘s helpful to have an understanding of the fundamental building blocks. This understanding will help hit the ground running with APIs.
Metric
A Metric is a business indicator measured over time. Metrics can be of different types — Sum, Count, Count Distinct, Min, Max or Average — depending on how they aggregate data. You can query Metrics in time series, counter, or leaderboard format depending on the use case you are building.
Data Pool
Data Pools provide the data that power Metrics. They are cached tables optimized for ultra-fast queries. Their data is synced from a table in your Data Source.
Data Source
Data Sources represent the different ways you can connect or send your data to Propel. Data can come from a data warehouse such as Snowflake or an HTTP integration where you post events or send files to an endpoint.
Application
Propel Applications represent the web or mobile app you are building. They provide the API credentials that allow your client- or server-side app to access the Propel API. The Application's Propeller determines the speed and cost of your Metric Queries.
Other concepts
Environments
Environments are independent and isolated Propel workspaces for development, staging (testing), and production workloads. Environments are hosted in a specific region, initially in us-east-2 only.
Propeller
A Propeller is your Application's query processing power. The larger the Propeller, the faster the queries and the higher the cost. Every Propel Application (and therefore every set of API credentials) has a Propeller that determines the speed and cost of queries.