Operational Owners Manual
đź‘‹ Welcome to Operational! This guide will help you understand the basics of Operational and how to get started.
Operational is here to help you solve operational issues inside your tech product. These could be pain points such as:
- I don’t know who signed up to my product.
- I want to reach out to potential high value customers that use my product.
- I want to reach out to people who don’t pay for the product after their trial ends but they seem to fit in my ICP.
- I want more visibility over cron jobs.
- I want to get notified when known errors happen.
And so on.
Most products in this space give you tools to track events but don’t tell you how to track, what to track, etc. With Operational, we’re writing this manual to help you better understand how to integrate our product so you get the most bang for your buck.
Before diving into setting up Operational(ops from now on), you should know 2 key concepts that make up ops.
- Events are the things that happen in your product, eg: user signed up, cron job ran, etc.
- Users are the people who use your product.
To set up ops successfully, you need to understand how these concepts work together and plan your implementation accordingly.
Events
Events are things like user signups, paying for subscriptions, etc.
In the context of ops, events are meant to be more serious things like user signups, paying for subscriptions, etc, as opposed to “user clicked a button”, “user used a feature”, etc.
Users
Users are people who are using your product. At the moment, users have been disabled for the beta period.
In the near future, we will release features that will help you visualize individual user’s journeys.
What makes Operational different
Logging tools are divided into two areas. Low level logging tools like the ELK stack, Greylog, Grafana, etc.
These tools are great for ingesting LOTS of data. But they are used to debug technical issues around website monitoring, system status, etc.
Then comes analytics tools like Mixpanel, Amplitude, Posthog and a few others.
They can also ingest lots of data, but you will be limited by cost. They are great for understanding how your users are using your product, how they use certain features, metrics on various events, etc.
Operational comes as a solution where you want to receive events, sometimes even push notifications for critical events. Operational is meant for logging high value, sometimes critical events.
In other words, if analytics tools give you macro level visibility of your product, Operational gives the micro level visibility.
How much data can you ingest with Operational?
A lot. Operational has been tested to ingested 2 million records easily at this stage. It can ingest a lot more data, but it is limited by cost.
For SaaS businesses doing between 5 - 10k a month, we don’t recommend sending more then 150,000 events.