Overview

This guide will introduce you to the concepts behind working with Neptune and give a short introduction to each of the high-level features.

1. Send Events to Neptune

An Event can be anything which you deem to be important to be recorded. User placed an order, User registered on your portal etc., all those are events which help you analyze the actions user is performing on your application, which in turn help you understand which features are being used. You would be sending an event to Neptune after it has occured.

When a particular type of events occurs, your application would be sending an Event Message or just a Message to Neptune by posting the data to Neptune's Ingest API. A message is nothing but a JSON Data Structure similar to following:

{
    "event_type": "request_otp_to_verify_email_during_registration",
}

You can learn more about Events and Messages in their respective documentation, and they are much more powerful than presented above. But, that's the simplest event possible.

2. Configure Notifications for an Event Type

You can configure how you Neptune should react when a message of a particular Event Type hits Neptune. You can go to Events -> Configure Notifications and select if you want to send email, sms or something else, and what Template should be used.

Neptune facilitates this functionality by using various other modules like Templates, Environments and Providers. It's done so to make it flexible enough. These concepts are explained in detail in their own sections, here we will briefly introduce these:

Templates : A template is the content which will be delivered to end users. If it's an email, it would be HTML content. If it's an SMS, it would be text content. Templates help you see the preview of the content and also use placeholder data which can be filled dynamically with the data you can send with Event Message. Learn More

Environments : Your application usually won't be just in production. You would have test and development environments. Instead of creating different teams, you can just create different environment like dev, staging, production etc., And opt to "mock" notifications instead of actually sending to users. Learn More.

Providers : To actually deliver an email, push notifications, sms you would need to configure Providers. Neptune doesn't come with providers to actually deliver the intended notification. It would use a provider of your choice like SES, Mailgun, Firebase, Twilio etc., You can see our complete list of providers here.

3. Analyze Events

You can keep an eye on your Event Messages using various features of Neptune. It would help developers and businesses immensely to get an insight in real time of all the messages sent by your applications.

Stream : Stream is a real-time view of all event messages. It not only tells you what messages are sent to Neptune, but gives a complete understanding of what payload was sent, what deliveries are triggers along with their statuses. It's one of the most powerful features of Neptune which we use to event track user behaviour across all products of Teurons Inc.

Daily Report : Daily Report gives you an 100 feet picture of what events happened in your applications for a selected Date. It's summarizes what are the top 10 events, recent events, last event, total events for that day.

Users : An event message can contain lot more information apart from event_type. You can event track event messages along with a user_id, which helps us populate and aggregate data across users.

Deliveries : Track all the deliveries and get an insight if any of the deliveries failed. This gives you one place to monitor all deliveries and their statuses.

4. Manage your Team

You can invite any number of members to your team, Neptune's pricing allows this without any limit. You can also manage members with permissions, so that everyone doesn't have same access.

5. Understand Usage

To be very clear on pricing Neptune's Usage dashboard gives you an insight into how many event messages were sent, how many deliveries were sent, how much data is stored etc., This gives a pretty clear understanding on the billing too.