Concepts
SNR means signal-to-noise ratio.
Principal: account and tenant
An API key identifies the calling account or Enterprise tenant:
- An account is a self-serve identity. Free and Pro accounts use shared infrastructure without a tenant-isolation guarantee.
- A tenant is an Enterprise environment with tenant isolation arranged during onboarding.
The tenant_key field is API metadata. It does not establish an isolation guarantee for a shared plan. See Tenant isolation.
Fleet
A fleet is everything a principal operates and observes: satellites, ground stations, data centers, and the links between them. The platform does not require a fleet schema up front. The fleet graph is projected from whatever telemetry you write, entity by entity, using the latest sample per entity. The console renders that graph on the globe and keeps every metric tied to one simulation clock.
Topology selects the newest sample per entity inside the requested freshness window. It can also return simulation geometry when observed telemetry is absent; inspect the response provenance. See Topology.
Asset registry
The console combines operator assets, catalog data, imports, and synthetic assets in a common registry. Available telemetry, orbital elements, and links determine which views and analyses can use an asset. Check its source before interpreting a displayed value as an observation.
Measurement families
Telemetry records carry a free-form measurement name on write, but topology reads project six canonical families:
| Measurement | Represents |
|---|---|
link | Feeder, ground-segment, and inter-satellite links |
satellite | Spacecraft state |
ground_station | Gateways and ground sites |
weather | Weather observations at sites |
attenuation | Signal attenuation along links (for example, rain fade) |
telemetry | General time-series metrics |
The GET /topology?measurement= read filter accepts only these six; any other value is rejected. Writes accept any name — put derived or custom metrics under telemetry with tags that identify them. See Data model.
The fleet agent
The fleet agent runs on your edge hosts and forwards telemetry: it listens on a local socket, buffers to disk, and delivers to the telemetry endpoint, so application code publishes locally and never holds the API credential.
Use each entity's observed_at to check when its telemetry was sampled. An absent sample can indicate a freshness-window or delivery problem; it does not by itself establish that a site is offline. constellation-agent verify confirms a node's own round trip. See Fleet agent.
Replay versus live
The console runs one simulation clock in two modes:
- Live pins the playhead to the newest stored sample and tracks incoming data, with an explicit indicator distinguishing live, stale, and disconnected.
- Replay samples a stored window at the playhead; scrubbing re-evaluates every sparkline, statistic, and card at that instant.
Use observation and prediction timestamps to distinguish source-data age from the selected playhead time.