Getting started

The API endpoint used in this guide is part of the Real-Time Customer Profile API. Before continuing, please review the getting started guide for links to related documentation, a guide to reading the sample API calls in this document, and important information regarding required headers that are needed to successfully make calls to any Experience Platform API.

Profile fragments vs merged profiles

This guide references both “profile fragments” and “merged profiles”. It is important to understand the difference between these terms before proceeding.

Each individual customer profile is composed of multiple profile fragments that have been merged to form a single view of that customer. For example, if a customer interacts with your brand across several channels, your organization likely has multiple profile fragments related to that single customer appearing in multiple datasets.

When profile fragments are ingested into Platform, they are merged together (based on a merge policy) in order to create a single profile for that customer. Therefore, the total number of profile fragments is likely to always be higher than the total number of merged profiles, as each profile is composed of multiple fragments.

To learn more about profiles and their role within Experience Platform, please begin by reading the Real-Time Customer Profile overview.

How the sample job is triggered

As data enabled for Real-Time Customer Profile is ingested into Platform, it is stored within the Profile data store. When the ingestion of records into the Profile store increases or decreases the total profile count by more than 5%, a sampling job is triggered to update the count. The way in which the sample is triggered depends on the type of ingestion being used:

  • For streaming data workflows, a check is done on an hourly basis to determine if the 5% increase or decrease threshold has been met. If it has, a sample job is automatically triggered to update the count.
  • For batch ingestion, within 15 minutes of successfully ingesting a batch into the Profile store, if the 5% increase or decrease threshold is met, a job is run to update the count. Using the Profile API you can preview the latest successful sample job, as well as list profile distribution by dataset and by identity namespace.

The profile count and profiles by namespace metrics are also available within the Profiles section of the Experience Platform UI. For information on how to access Profile data using the UI, please visit the Profile UI guide.