Configure server-side event forwarding rules

Configuring server-side event forwarding rules produces a deployed property on the edge network that intercepts inbound event data and selectively forwards it to external systems — without requiring any additional JavaScript to execute in the visitor's browser. The primary output is a versioned, published library of data elements and rules running at the edge that transforms and routes XDM payloads in real time.

The critical design decisions are: which fields from the XDM payload to extract (full event body vs. selective fields for privacy or payload-size reasons), which external endpoints to target, and what trigger conditions (if any) should gate forwarding. The arc.event.xdm path model allows precise field selection by referencing nested XDM schema paths. Teams must also decide whether to forward to a single endpoint or fan out to multiple destinations in parallel — each forwarding rule action is evaluated independently, so multiple actions on one rule is a common pattern.

This task has medium parallelism across CDP architectures. Native edge-network event forwarding is specific to platforms that operate an edge node between the browser and the data warehouse. Composable alternatives achieve equivalent outcomes through server-side stream processors (Apache Kafka, AWS Kinesis, Google Pub/Sub) with consumer workers that apply field filtering and POST to target endpoints. Hightouch and similar reverse ETL tools do not provide a native event-forwarding layer; the composable equivalent is a Kafka consumer with a connector to the target system.