This article describes the basic architecture of multi-app subscriptions.
A Pendo subscription can contain one or more applications. An application refers to any web or mobile application on a single platform (web, iOS, Android, and so on). Every subscription has a default web application.
A single-app subscription uses one application (API) key. A multi-app subscription involves having an API key for each application, giving you an application-level view as well as a holistic view of usage across applications. You can also provision user roles by application when you have a multi-app subscription.
What happens at the subscription level
Visitors, Accounts, Product Areas, segments, reports, internal users, and integrations are processed and stored at the subscription level.
There's a single source of data, security settings, and user permissions in a subscription. Each subscription houses all underlying guidance, analytics, and feedback and doesn’t communicate with other, separate subscriptions. This means that:
- All settings, content, and services are managed separately for each subscription.
- Users aren’t shared between subscriptions.
- Users in one subscription can only access data in another subscription if they have access to both subscriptions.
A subscription is located in a specific region: US, EU, and so on. Each region has its own data center to support different compliance requirements.
You can have more than one subscription if you want to keep the data separate so that you can manage different products separately (for example, by different departments or with unique user access, security, and compliance requirements) or because you have separate user bases for your products.
What happens at the application level
Events, Pages, Features, tags, guides, and feedback requests are collected, processed, and stored at the application level. Each app in your subscription also has its own Resource Center. You can customize the Resource Center for each app in the same way or individually. For more information on the Resource Center, see the Overview of the Resource Center.
Note: If you have the Zendesk Knowledge Base integration, you can only add one Knowledge Base across all the Resource Centers in your subscription.
Each application within a subscription is identified by its own API key in Subscription Settings under App Details and Install Settings.
If you have more than one subscription, check that you’re in the correct subscription before launching the designer to create a guide, Page, or Feature in an application. The application name is displayed in the top-right of the Visual Design Studio.
Prerequisites
For optimal multi-app subscriptions, Visitor IDs must identify the same end users across your apps. For example, an ID of “1234” must represent the same Visitor in App1 as in App2. If two distinct visitors are both identified with “1234” in different apps, you need a separate subscription for your apps or a separate identifier to preserve visitor uniqueness.
If you have apps that pass different IDs across applications because they don't identify the same visitor across applications, the format can't overlap. If there's an overlap, the metadata from one app can overwrite the metadata from another app.
Functionality
Although Visitor IDs can persist across applications, Pendo functionality is app-specific. This means that:
- If a guide is created for one app, it won’t show up in others.
- Pages and Features only correspond to the app in which they’re tagged.
- Feedback end users only see feature requests for the particular apps they have access to.
You can see user behavior in one, some, or all of the apps in a subscription. This means that you can run a Pendo subscription across multiple applications and still filter your analytics, guides, and feedback to specific applications if you want to. This is useful when:
- You have web and mobile versions of the same app.
- You have multiple web apps that can identify the same visitors.
- You want to compare data across multiple apps that pass unique IDs that don’t overlap in format.
You can switch between apps with dropdown menus in Pendo. You can also use this functionality as high-level segmentation for dashboard widgets and behavior tools.
Setup
Each application has its own API key. We use the API key to differentiate between the events for each application in your Pendo subscription. This is how we separate analytics, guides, and feedback across different products, giving you more control.
Your development team must use the corresponding API key for each app in your Pendo subscription. To find an app's API key:
- Navigate to Settings > Subscription Settings.
- Open the Applications tab.
- Find and open the relevant app from your Applications list. The App Details tab is open by default.
- Find the string on the API Key row. This is your API key.
You can also find the API key from the Install Settings tab. The key is the string at the bottom of your install script.
Find your Subscription ID
Typically, the subscription ID is needed for CNAME, CSP, and other feature setups. You can find your subscription ID in the URL when you navigate to the Subscription Settings page.
Additional resources
Visit the Pendo Academy for a video on multi-app best practices.
If you want additional help deciding between using a multi-app subscription versus multiple individual subscriptions, we recommend watching our video on subscription architecture.