Connections
Working with the systems that stay authoritative for their own data.
Your operating system does not replace your CRM, your ledger, or your identity provider. It coordinates with them.
One authority per fact
The rule that keeps integrations from becoming a source of corruption:
If your CRM owns account ownership, Continual reads it and never writes it back as authoritative. If your operating system owns whether an incident is resolved, that is yours. Never make both directions authoritative for the same fact, because there is no correct way to resolve the conflict.
Convergence, not fire-and-forget
Integrations converge: an operation is idempotent, runs synchronously when it can, and is repaired by a scheduled repair job when the provider was unavailable. Retry is not bolted on afterward—running the same operation twice is safe by construction.
Connections
A connection is an installed integration in a workspace, holding the credentials and configuration for one external system. Connectors are the available integration types.
Secrets are write-only: you provide them, the platform encrypts them, and no read path returns them to a client. Backend process access to a secret is authorized and audited separately from reading the record that holds it.