Integrate External Data Sources into a Journey

External data source integration enriches a journey's decision logic and message personalization with contextual signals that live outside the CDP's own profile store — real-time weather conditions, live product inventory, current loyalty point balance, or shipping status. The core output is a reusable data source configuration that the journey engine calls at runtime, at the exact moment a customer reaches the data-fetch step, ensuring the context is fresh and specific to that customer's current situation rather than a batch-computed attribute.

Key configuration decisions include: the API endpoint structure and authentication pattern, which response fields to expose to the journey (defining the Field Group), how to pass dynamic journey context to the API request (using event-payload or profile-attribute values as request parameters), and whether to configure a caching TTL to reduce API call volume for high-traffic journeys. Error handling — what the journey should do if the external API returns an error or times out — is also a critical guardrail to configure.

Parallel viability note (AEP-locked module): Real-time API enrichment during journey execution is a pattern that requires stateful per-profile execution capability. In composable stacks, the nearest equivalent is an enrichment step inside a workflow orchestrator (Temporal activity, Lambda function in a Step Functions workflow) that calls the external API and stores the result in a transient execution context. General-purpose message orchestration platforms like Braze or Iterable support limited real-time content block lookups, but the full dynamic-parameter, live-API-call pattern is characteristic of dedicated journey orchestration engines. Adobe Journey Optimizer's stateful, event-driven orchestration has no clean parallel in composable stacks — the nearest pattern is an external orchestrator (e.g., Temporal, Airflow) with a custom enrichment activity, but this lacks the millisecond latency and tight profile-store integration AJO provides.