Article · Updated July 2026
Analytics With Your Own Keys
“Connect your data” means making a deliberate choice about access. Metricsjar uses hosted refreshes to keep a dashboard current without depending on your computer.
The boundary is simple enough to audit.
Hosted refreshes
Hosted refreshes keep the dashboard running without your computer. You connect each provider explicitly in Data health. Metricsjar stores:
- a read-only Google BigQuery OAuth grant;
- a least-privilege RevenueCat V2 key;
- an App Store Connect key with the role you choose;
- DataForSEO API credentials when you enable paid enrichment;
- per-dashboard project, dataset, app, country, and market mappings.
Credentials are encrypted before storage and are not displayed back in the product. Disconnecting a provider disables its schedules and removes the stored Metricsjar connection. Provider-side revocation remains available too.
What Metricsjar receives
Metricsjar stores the computed payload needed for your dashboard. Depending on the sources you connect, that can include keyword rows, page performance, traffic totals, backlink summaries, app downloads, revenue, retention, and product events.
This is still business data. Treat dashboard access as you would access to any analytics report. The own-keys model reduces credential exposure; it does not turn the published metrics into public information.
Why the distinction matters
Long-lived integration credentials create three kinds of work:
- Trust. You must accept the scopes and security posture of another platform.
- Rotation. When a key changes, every hosted integration using it must be updated.
- Cost. The platform either absorbs source-query costs or passes them back through a subscription.
The credentials and provider accounts remain yours. DataForSEO usage hits your balance and BigQuery jobs run in your project. Metricsjar provides the hosted schedule, connection health, and dashboard access.
The trade-offs
Hosted execution requires trusting Metricsjar with encrypted provider access and keeping those grants least-privilege. Source APIs can change, and provider reports can arrive late.
That is why Metricsjar keeps source health alongside the refresh:
- It reports the account and dashboard mapping the schedule will actually use.
- It distinguishes a missing configuration from an upstream publishing delay.
- It shows the last successful run and the next expected refresh.
- It reports stale data rather than quietly presenting it as current.
For setup, start with the getting-started guide. If Search Console is one of your sources, enable its BigQuery export first because it does not backfill.