The latest from the PostHog community

Array 1.17.0

Nov 17, 2020

Having launched major features in our previous release such as Session Recording and apps, over the past two weeks we worked extremely hard to improve PostHog's UX, enhance the new Beta features, and fix a bunch of bugs.

You'll notice PostHog feels much nicer to use and that's largely in part to all the feedback we've received from our users, so thank you and keep the suggestions coming!

Release Notes

If you're self-hosting and want to upgrade for a better experience with nicer features, remember to update your PostHog instance.

Sentry Integration

Sentry Screenshot

An important part of developing a great user experience is identifying, tracking, and fixing bugs.

With our new Sentry integration, you can leverage PostHog data to help your debugging, and Sentry exception data to track relevant UX metrics. As a two-way integration, it:

  • Adds a direct link in Sentry to the profile of the person affected in PostHog
  • Sends an $exception event to PostHog with a direct link to Sentry

If you're unfamiliar with Sentry, we highly recommend you to check it out - it is an awesome application monitoring platform of which we're avid users at PostHog.

To set up the integration you can read the step-by-step instructions on the dedicated Sentry Integration page.

RudderStack Integration

RudderStack is an open-source, warehouse-first, customer data platform for developers. It allows you to collect and deliver customer event data to a variety of destinations such as data warehouses and analytics platforms.

As of last week, PostHog is now available as a destination on RudderStack, allowing you to send your event data from various sources into PostHog for performing product analytics.

You can read more about RudderStack on their website, and learn how to integrate PostHog through their comprehensive integration docs.

App Attachments and GeoIP Plugin

MaxMind App Page Screenshot

Over the past two weeks, our Apps feature was extensively worked on to improve the experience of using and developing apps for PostHog.

One of the main changes was the addition of app attachments, which allow you to upload files that are used in the configuration of the app, vastly expanding the realm of possibilities of what apps can do.

As a result of this, we built the PostHog MaxMind App, leveraging attachments to allow GeoIP data to be used for enriching your events. Once configured, the app adds IP-based location information as properties on your events, such as what country and city your users are located in, making it possible to create charts and tables filtered based on the location of your users.

Note: Apps are currently only available on self-hosted instances. If you're self-hosting and want to use the PostHog MaxMind App, please follow these instructions. If you want to build your own apps, check out our fresh new guide on how to do so.

Retentions & Paths Dashboard Panels

Retention Panel Screenshot

Dashboards are a key part of PostHog, so it's important to us that you can have an overview of as many as possible of your metrics in them.

As such, the user paths graph and the retention table can now be added as panels on dashboards, making it so that every single chart, table, funnel, and graph you create in PostHog can make it to your dashboards now.

First Time Retention

First Time Retention Screenshot

Following some feedback from our own Growth Engineer on what functionality we need for ourselves at PostHog, we have now extended the functionality of our 'Retention' view, adding first time retention and differentiating between 'Cohortizing' and 'Retaining' events.

In short, first time retention cohortizes users based on when they did an event for the first time, rather than adding a user to each cohort they had the event in. Additionally, by being able to have different target events for the cohort and the retention, you are able to track the impact of 'Event A' on the retention of 'Event B', exploring hypotheses such as how users who read your documentation retain on product pageviews when compared to other users.

New Events & Actions View

Manage Events View Screenshot

In an effort to make it easier to filter through your events in PostHog and tag events that you find useful, we have now consolidated 'Events' and 'Actions' into one single view, found on the left sidebar as 'Events & Actions'.

On this page, you'll be able to manage everything related to your events, from inspecting their properties, to tagging them as actions. In addition, we have also added stats for your event and property volumes, so you can dig deeper into your analytics data collection, and optimize it to your needs.

Improved AWS CloudFormation Deployment

Following a lot of great user feedback, we have now significantly improved our AWS CloudFormation Deployment.

We have now added configuration for relevant alerts and RDS disk size, as well as improved the setup flow and added automatic SECRET_KEY generation. If you're happy with the standard config, deploying with AWS is now just a matter of "click, click, click", as described by Karl, one of our engineers.

Share your feedback

We'd love to hear anything you have to say about PostHog, good or bad. As a thank you, we'll share some awesome PostHog merch.

Want to get involved? Email us to schedule a 30 minute call with one of our teams to help us make PostHog even better!

Favorite Issue

EPIC: Retention

A roadmap for various retention improvements that will significantly increase the power of PostHog's retention functionality.

PostHog News

Our community continues to be as awesome as ever, providing valuable feedback and helping out with issues, pull requests, and discussions on our community page.

This week, we want to give a special shoutout to Adam, who got 2 PRs merged and wrote an article about integrating PostHog on their website.

Check it out: Valuing user privacy — PostHog Analytics

Open Roles

Are you a Lead Designer, Fullstack Engineer, or Recruiter?

Or perhaps you're not either but think you'd still be a good fit for PostHog?

We want you!

Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements

In addition to the highlights listed above, we also merged a bunch of PRs improving PostHog's performance and fixing bugs:


Ready to find out more?