Identifying Devices

Alloy supports two methods of identifying unique Device records during ongoing monitoring. When a unique Device is identified, Alloy will store a record for that device so it can be measured for velocity rules and link analysis. It's important to understand the difference between these identification methods when designing your integration to confirm which is best for your use case.

Using Vendor Device IDs

If you're using a 3rd-party service for device monitoring, most vendors support a proprietary method to identify unique devices based on characteristics collected during profiling and returns an ID (Alias) for the device in their API response. By default, Alloy will automatically store Device records for each unique ID returned by the vendor and link it to the Entity associated with the Event/Evaluation where device profiling was performed.

A Device Token is assigned to each unique Device created in Alloy's database and is how users can determine if aliases from multiple vendors are referencing the same Device. When a Device is evaluated that Alloy has seen previously in your Account, any new data will be appended to the existing Device record. This functionality is supported for all event types, as well as onboarding applications.

At this time, Alloy supports this method of device identification for the following vendors:

Vendor	Device Identification Field	Notes
TruValidate (Iovation)	Device Alias (`device_alias`)
ThreatMetrix	ExactID (`device_id`) or SmartID (`fuzzy_device_id` )	Configurable in the Alloy dashboard based on your preferred method of identification. ExactID is used by default.

Using Custom External Device IDs

If you've established your own internal method of identifying devices, Alloy's Events API supports an optional external_device_id field (nested within the device object) that you can use to identify Devices instead of relying on 3rd-party vendors for reconciliation. You can use this field to control how associates device data to unique Device records in Alloy's database.

It's important to note that the external_device_id differs from the Device IDs assigned by 3rd-party vendors. If you aren't using a 3rd-party vendor through Alloy, you can use this field to uniquely identify Devices in Alloy, however please note that the saved data will be limited and won't contain as much information as 3rd-party vendors.

Please note that Alloy only recommends using this field if you want to do your own device reconciliation. If you would like to use a 3rd-party vendors for reconciliation, this field is not recommended.