Cohorts

Cohorts are logical groupings of devices within a product that enable group metrics and releases for sub-sections of your fleet.

Logical groupings

You may structure your cohorts as you wish, but the following are common approaches:

• Environments: Organize devices into development, staging, and production cohorts.
• Release Channels: Organize devices into nightly, canary, and stable cohorts.
• Operational Segments: Organize devices into geographic, tenant-related, and other domain-specific cohorts.

you can always change

Some use cases are satisfied with a single cohort, and some require an elaborate hierarchy. You can always adjust your cohorts and move devices between them server-side later without requiring device-side changes.

consider cadence, content, and metrics

We recommend considering if you would want to target different devices with different release cadences or bundles, or if you want to collect and analyze metrics for distinct groups. Those groups may be candidates to specify cohorts for.

Metrics

One of the key benefits of using cohorts is the ability to view and analyze metrics segmented by logical groups of devices. By comparing data across cohorts, you can gain valuable insights into how different subsets of your fleet are behaving and performing. Cohort-based metrics enable anomaly detection, release monitoring, and trend analysis.

Release channel

Cohorts are associated with zero to one release channels. Release channels are associated with zero to many cohorts. Releases are associated with exactly one release channel.

release resolution requires cohorts

Only devices within a cohort are able to perform bundle resolution via release resolution.