Identity graph

Identity graph lives in the People area of the dashboard, under Identity.

At a glance#

What it does#

The identity graph shows which identifiers have been linked to which. It is a link table across three relationships:

• installation_id → anonymous_id

• device_id → installation_id

• anonymous_id → user_id

That last one is the important link — it is the moment an anonymous visitor became a known person, and it happens when your app calls identify.

When to use it#

When a count does not match your expectation of how many people it represents, and when a user appears twice. Almost every "our user numbers look wrong" question resolves to identity: either links that should exist and do not, or links that exist and should not.

Workflow#

1. 1

   Check whether user links exist at all

   No anonymous_id → user_id rows means identify is not being called. Everything downstream — profiles, segments, per-user metrics — is then counting devices, not people.

2. 2

   Look for one user id with many anonymous ids

   Normal in moderation (a person on several devices), suspicious in volume. A very high fan-in usually means a shared or default identifier is being passed to identify.

3. 3

   Look for one anonymous id with many user ids

   That is a shared device, or an identify call that fires with the wrong id after logout.

Permissions and prerequisites#

Requires event ingestion. Meaningful user links require the SDK's identify — see Identity.

Limits and edge cases#

• Linking is forward-only. Events that arrived before identify was called stay attributed to the anonymous identifier; identifying does not retroactively rewrite history.

• Rows are capped for display. The page reads a bounded number of links, so on a large app this is a sample rather than the complete graph.

• Never identify with a value you might reuse. An identifier that is not stable and unique per person merges two people permanently, and there is no undo.

Troubleshooting#

No user links. Identify is not being called, or it is being called with an empty value. This is the single most common integration gap and it silently degrades everything person-shaped.

One user id linked to hundreds of anonymous ids. Look for a placeholder being passed — an empty string, "unknown", or a tenant id instead of a user id.

Where the data comes from#

A missing clearUser() on sign-out is the usual cause of a wrong link here.

From the SDK

• Identity

Served by

• People / CDP

Related#

• Identity SDK guide

• Profiles

• Devices

• User properties

• People overview