Core Concepts

The mental model behind Vanta: events, users, groups, metrics, and context.

Core concepts

Vanta is built around a small number of primitives. Understanding how they fit together makes the rest of the documentation easier to follow.

• Events record something that happened in your application.
• Users and groups give events identity, so you can answer who did what.
• Measurements and counters track numeric data such as latency or throughput.
• Context and sources describe the environment an event came from.

Events

An event is the core unit of data. You send one whenever something meaningful happens, such as a signup, a purchase, or a background job completing. Each event carries a type, optional user or group association, and structured data.

Events are immutable once stored, so you can query a project's history with confidence. See the Events page for the full model.

Users and groups

A user is identified by a string userId. You attach an identity to a user once, and Vanta connects that identity to every event they produce afterward.

A group is a collection you can associate events with, such as an organization, team, or workspace. Groups make it possible to build multi-tenant analytics where you can answer questions about an entire account rather than a single user.

Measurements and counters

Beyond events, Vanta tracks metrics. A measurement records an observed value at a point in time, such as a request taking 84 milliseconds. A counter records change over time through increments and decrements, such as the number of jobs processed by a worker.

Context and sources

Every event carries context: metadata about the environment, such as browser, device, operating system, URL, and timezone. Sources identify where an event came from, for example web, node, or mobile.