Data Sources

Tonkean has native integrations with hundreds of SaaS applications, authenticating using one of three primary methods: API key, OAuth, and webhook. You are able to connect using whatever method is supported by the application, as well as what is best for your use case. For example, some applications, like Intercom, require a webhook connection to function properly and maintain real-world response times, while other applications, like Salesforce, can work well with an OAuth connection using a service account (which checks for changes every 10-15 minutes).

You can also create custom webhooks to connect any data source you have access to.

Whenever you connect a data source, whether native or custom, you can configure which data Tonkean has access to—and we recommend providing access only to the data necessary to orchestrate your particular workflow. For more information, see Permissions and Access Control.

When Tonkean monitors (or ingests) data, it does so at the level of the individual entity within a data source. "Entity" is synonymous with "object"— that which contains the data records from a given source.

For example, if you connect a Salesforce instance, it has numerous entities you can monitor: Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, and so on. If you choose to monitor Opportunities, Tonkean ingests all the Opportunities in your Salesforce instance, each Opportunity being a data source record. When these records are processed by a Tonkean module, they become module items, which are what the Tonkean module monitors and takes action on, as defined by your module workflow.

You can view the items generated by any given data source by navigating to the Enterprise Components screen, selecting the data source, and then selecting View Data in the data source configuration panel:

Below is the View Data screen for a Salesforce data source. Notice that the entity selected in the Explore Entities field is Opportunities. In the table, each row is a data source record. These are the records as they exist in the relevant data source, before they're filtered or processed by a Tonkean module.

You can view the items processed by a module by viewing the relevant business report. In the same way each data record displays as a row in the View Data screen, each module item is a row in the business report:

Tonkean stores data in an encrypted database when integrating with third-party applications. All monitored changes to this data update the database. Only the entities that users specify from connected applications (for example, Salesforce Accounts or Opportunities) are stored in the production database.

When data is no longer needed, it is archived either manually or at user-defined intervals. Deleting a data source from a Tonkean instance deletes all stored data associated with that application in the database. Additionally, admins can define module item-level data retention policies, ensuring data is only available as long as it's needed for each process.