The Syntasa software is a powerful platform that enables you to quickly build a wide variety of data pipelines and solutions. With such flexibility, there are numerous configurations, objects, and modules that are available.
The main menu, accessed via the icon ( ), organizes these items keeping the most used menus being the most accessible. Each menu is described in detail below, but the menus are grouped from a high level per the following:
- Building apps and notebooks - Platform items are used daily to utilize notebooks, build apps, monitor jobs, etc. Resources items are building-block items users define to then be used to build apps.
- Resources - A collection of foundational objects used for storing and building apps and their related data. Runtimes, connections, and Stores are essential prerequisites for app development, while events and files are optional but valuable for conducting experiments, building apps, and scheduling jobs.
- Audience - This module enables advertising and audience professionals to easily build both rules-based audiences and algorithmic audiences with custom AI/ML algorithms.
- Integrations - 3rd-party software solutions that have been integrated with Syntasa. Other integrations, for example, JupyterHub notebooks and Helical Insight data visualization tools exist but are found within other (sub)menus.
Platform
Create, edit, and view apps that have been built in the environment. The apps are organized into groups based on functionality and templates available for each function:
- Workspace - Primary building area, this is the home of apps, dashboards, and notebooks
- Activity - System-wide monitoring module with various views on jobs, executions, and events
- Dataflows - Create diagrams showing how specific production apps are interconnected
- Dashboards - Dashboards are also within Workspace, but this is a dedicated view for users only interested in dashboards
Audience
The Syntasa Audience solution provides users with Data Management Platform (DMP) capabilities of organizing centralized behavioral and non-behavioral user data into attributes, combining attributes to create audience segments, and passing the audiences to downstream systems, such as Demand Side Platforms (DSP), Facebook, Yahoo!, Google Analytics, Nielsen.
- Data Layers - The foundation of an audience, the creation of a data layer selects the datasets available for defining attributes
- Apps - Users build attributes, build audiences, and select the audiences to send to downstream systems
- Activation - Only available to users with the role of System Admin, this allows for viewing and updating the schedules for all audience-related apps, i.e. attributes, audiences, sync
- User-Defined Process - (see below under Templates)
Resources
Foundational objects that are used to build and store apps and their related data. Connections and stores are required before apps can be built; events and files are optional, but also useful when running experiments, building apps, and scheduling jobs.
- Runtimes - (see below under Templates)
- Connections - Define various types of inbound and outbound integrations such as file locations, databases, APIs, etc.
- Events - Define events, such as file watchers, that can be used as a notification or to trigger a job
- Files - A file object allows you to encapsulate and upload one or more files from your local machine to the platform
- Stores - Various database types to store apps, data, and Syntasa-specialized information
Templates
Similar to resources, templates are also building blocks for apps, but when defined instead of being distinct objects there are individual instances generated based on the template.
- User-Defined Process - User-defined processes (UDP) are custom-built templates that bundle up code processes such as spark processors or BQ Processes into a single cohesive reusable no-code template process. UDPs can incorporate their own user interface (UI) elements, allowing for easy editing and customization of parameters specific to the UDP. This flexibility enables efficient management and execution of complex processes within a unified framework. UDPs can be then utilized in apps by dragging them into the workflow
- Runtime - Determine the template for the size and settings of clusters used in job and experiment processing. Separate cluster instances, based on the selected runtime template, are created/started when jobs, notebooks, etc. invoke a computing resource.