Core Concepts

Organizations, customers, and users

Prismatic writes software for other software companies who have their own customers, so it's important to disambiguate terms like organization and customer.

When your company signs up with Prismatic, you create an organization (sometimes referred to as an "account" or "tenant"). Your organization has multiple customers whom you can manage - those are your customers. Users can be created for both your organization and your customers, with organization users having broader, company-wide roles and permissions, and customer users having permissions limited in scope to their company. To keep things separate, we often refer to organization users as "team members" in docs and the web app.

Integrations and instances

Within your organization you can assemble an integration by tying together multiple component's actions. That integration can be tested using our integration designer. Once you are satisfied with your integration, it can be published, and instances of the integration can be configured and deployed to one or many of your customers.

Instances deployed to customers can be configured using customer-specific config variables, so one integration can be uniquely deployed to multiple customers with different setups.

Logging, monitoring, and alerting

When an integration behaves unexpectedly (takes too long to run, or fails to run to completion), you want your team to be notified. Prismatic's alert monitors can be configured to monitor your instances, and notify your team in the event of an issue. Logs of all instance runs are retained, so you can debug production issues and rapidly resolve problems.

Not all alerts indicate bad things happened - alert monitors can be configured to run when an instance is enabled (so your project management team can mark implementations as complete), or can be configured to alert a customer via Slack or Email that an integration that runs daily ran successfully.