This article explains how to prevent unexpected visitor and account metadata fields from being created through the Pendo agent. Blocking these fields helps maintain data quality, avoid metadata sprawl, and reduce the risk of accidental or unauthorized data entering your subscription.
For background on how metadata works in Pendo, see Configure visitor and account metadata and Metadata and data mappings.
How it works
To help you control what metadata is accepted into your subscription, Pendo provides a subscription setting that blocks new metadata fields sent through the agent. This setting ensures that only metadata fields you've already defined are processed, and discards any new or unexpected keys sent from client-side code.
When activated, this setting:
- Processes only metadata fields that already exist in your schema.
- Discards any new fields sent from the agent at the time of processing.
- Doesn't retain logs or data from dropped fields.
- Ensures that blocked metadata is never stored or visible in Pendo.
This setting doesn’t prevent you from using new agent metadata fields entirely. You can still define and manage your allowed fields through the POST metadata field and DELETE metadata field API endpoints. After a field is added using the POST endpoint, it will be accepted by Pendo, even while this setting is enabled.
Important: Data sent for blocked metadata fields is permanently discarded and can’t be recovered.
Activate or deactivate this setting
Only subscription admins can update the setting for blocking visitor and account metadata from the agent. To block new metadata fields sent from the agent:
- Go to Settings > Subscription settings.
- In the Security and privacy section, select Block undefined agent metadata fields.
To resume accepting new metadata fields, clear the checkbox.
Tip: To enforce field governance, activate this setting after your metadata schema is finalized. For more details on subscription settings, see Subscription settings.
Manage metadata fields through the API
Subscription admins can use the public API to create, delete, or undelete metadata fields. This allows you to manage which fields exist in your subscription’s metadata schema. To control whether new fields from the agent are accepted, use the Block undefined agent metadata fields setting described above.
Note: Undeleting a metadata field doesn't restore previous values. If a data scrub was run while the field was deleted, that data is permanently lost.