Glossary
One name per concept. The words these docs and the API use, and what each means.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Workspace | Your Gauge account: the tenant. Everything a key can reach belongs to one workspace. |
| Member | A person with a seat in the workspace. A key always acts as a member. |
| Role | What a member may do and see. A key can never do more than its member's role. |
| API key | A secret that authenticates requests as one member, within its scopes. pulse_k_live_… or pulse_k_test_…. |
| Scope | A permission on a key, by area: messages:write, contacts:read. |
| Live / test | A key's environment. Test keys reach sandbox data only. |
| Connection | One connected channel account: a WhatsApp number, an inbox, a Facebook Page. Not the same as a channel (the type) or an identity (the person's address). |
| Channel | The kind of connection: WhatsApp Cloud API, WhatsApp Web, email, web chat, Instagram, Messenger, SMS, voice. In the API, a connection's kind. |
| Capabilities | What a connection can do over the API right now: text, media, templates, starting conversations. |
| Contact | A person, merged across channels. |
| Identity | One way to reach a contact: a channel plus the id on it, such as a WhatsApp number. |
| Conversation | A contact on one connection: a thread with a status, an assignee and tags. |
| Message | One item in a conversation: inbound or outbound text, media, template or interactive. |
| Template | A WhatsApp message pre-approved by Meta, the only kind allowed outside the 24-hour window. |
| 24-hour window | WhatsApp's rule: free-form messages only within 24 hours of the customer's last message. |
| App | A product of yours connected to Gauge Support (in older docs and the API, a project). |
| Integration | One way into an App: in-app chat, a WhatsApp number, an email address. It has a key such as customer or salon. Not an API key. |
| Webhook endpoint | Your URL that receives events, with its subscriptions and signing secret. |
| Event | Something that happened, delivered to webhooks: support.ticket.created. Has a stable id. |
| Delivery | One attempt to POST an event to an endpoint. An event can have several. |
| Idempotency key | A header that makes a retried POST safe: the same key never does the work twice. |
| Request id | The id of one API request, in X-Request-Id. Quote it to support. |
| Cursor | An opaque marker for the next or previous page of a list. |