Glossary
This glossary defines important terms you'll encounter while building with the Orbit Platform, developing Agents, and deploying in your Business Unit infrastructure.
A
Account
A subdivision under an Organization in your Orbit deployment. Accounts represent business units, departments, or customer instances. Each account manages its own users, agents, and dashboards in your infrastructure.
Action
A discrete operation that an agent can perform, such as sending an email, running a query, or updating a record.
Agent
A service or capability that your team builds to perform domain-specific tasks. Agents follow Orbit blueprints and can be shared with other Business Units via the marketplace.
Agent Blueprint
A schema that defines the structure, configuration, and behavior of an agent. Used as the foundation for creating reusable agent templates.
Agent Marketplace
The central hub for discovering agent templates and starter kits. Business Units publish successful agents here for other teams to clone and customize.
AI Tools Schema (formerly meta.json)
The metadata file (ai-tools.json) that defines an agent's capabilities, endpoints, security requirements, and compliance settings.
B
Business Unit (BU)
An organizational division that builds and hosts its own agents using the Orbit platform foundation. BUs maintain autonomy over their infrastructure, data, and agent deployments.
Built-in Agent Templates
Agent starter kits and reference implementations provided by Orbit. Business Units use these as foundations to build their own domain-specific agents.
Blueprint Protocols
Specifications or standards that ensure agents are interoperable across the Orbit ecosystem.
C
Chat
A conversational interface within Orbit for interacting with agents. Chats can be standalone or embedded in dashboards.
Community Agent
Agent templates and solutions contributed by Business Units and shared in the marketplace. These showcase domain expertise and proven patterns for specific industries or use cases.
Component
A visual UI block (chart, table, metric card, markdown, form, etc.) rendered in dashboards based on declarative JSON schemas.
D
Dashboard
A customizable workspace within the Orbit App that displays data using components like charts, tables, metrics, and markdown.
Declarative Schema
A JSON-based format used to describe how UI components should be rendered (e.g., chart type, data source, styling). Enables agents to generate dynamic UIs.
E
Embed / Export
The ability to export dashboards or components as images, PDFs, or secure share links. Embeds allow Orbit content to be integrated into external apps or sites.
F
Flow
Short for Orbit Flow — the agentic UI system that renders components dynamically from declarative schemas.
I
Integration Hub
A central service that connects Orbit with external APIs and tools. Provides shared authentication, credentials, and standard integration flows.
J
JWT (JSON Web Token)
A signed token used for authentication. Partner apps can issue JWT requests to Orbit to create or log in users securely.
M
Metric Card
A UI component in dashboards that highlights a single key metric (e.g., “Active Users: 1,204”).
Marketplace
See Agent Marketplace.
O
Observability
The practice of collecting and analyzing telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces) from Orbit services and agents. Powered by OpenTelemetry.
Organization
The top-level entity in your Orbit deployment. Each organization can contain multiple accounts, users, and agents within your infrastructure.
Orbit Console
Orbit-hosted development environment for building, testing, and publishing agents to the marketplace. Used by Business Units for development and testing only.
Orbit Hosted
Complete platform toolkit that Business Units deploy in their own infrastructure, including development tools, marketplace, and production runtime environment.
P
Platform Foundation
The core Orbit framework that Business Units build upon to create their own agent-powered solutions while maintaining infrastructure autonomy.
Playground
A testing environment where developers can experiment with agent calls, schemas, and protocols before deploying them to production. Available in both Console (development) and Hosted (production testing) environments.
Protocol
A standard or rule that agents follow for communication, configuration, or data exchange (e.g., Orbit Agent-to-Agent protocol).
R
Registry (Agent Registry)
The catalog of all registered agents within Orbit. Includes metadata, capabilities, and configuration options for discovery and governance.
RBAC (Role-Based Access Control)
A permissions model that restricts access to Orbit features and agents based on assigned roles at the org, account, or user level.
S
Schema (Agent Schema)
The JSON structure that defines an agent’s configuration, inputs, outputs, and supported actions.
SDK (Software Development Kit)
Tools and libraries provided by Orbit to help Business Unit developers build and integrate agents more easily.
Starter Kit
Pre-built agent templates and boilerplate code that Business Units can use as starting points for building domain-specific agents.
Sub-Agent
A specialized agent designed to handle a narrow domain of tasks, often orchestrated by a lead agent.
T
Telemetry
Data collected from Orbit services (traces, logs, metrics) for monitoring and debugging.
Template (Dashboard Template)
A pre-configured dashboard layout with predefined components, used to quickly set up common use cases.
U
User
An individual identity in Orbit. Users belong to accounts and can have different roles (e.g., Admin, Editor, Viewer).
W
Widget
Another term for a dashboard component (chart, table, metric card, etc.).
Workflow
A sequence of tasks or actions orchestrated by agents to achieve an end goal. Workflows can include integrations, data processing, and notifications.
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