PubNub's Events & Actions is Now Generally Available

PubNub is excited to announce that Events & Actions is now generally available! Events & Actions (E&A) is a new feature that addresses the challenge of capturing and reacting to critical events generated by users interacting in real time.

Chat messages, purchases, location data, and even emojis create millions of tiny events that are often treated as transient data and immediately get lost or ignored due to the cost and complexity of processing them.

Events & Actions is a way to capture some of these events and route them to third-party systems for storage, processing, data analysis, and more.

Easily capture important real-time data

Events & Actions extends the PubNub platform with powerful new real-time integration and event routing.

Here are some examples of where E&A can enhance your application:

• Filter messages from certain channels (or all channels) and send them on an external storage service (like Amazon SQS) for archiving.

• Filter critical events (purchases, auction bids, flagged content) and send them to your own backend system for processing.

• Filter emoji reactions within chat sessions and send them to a third-party system for sentiment analysis.

What are the key benefits of E&A? 

Events & Actions has a number of unique capabilities that make it stand out on the market.

• Capture critical events. Events & Actions sifts through millions of events in real-time and sends the relevant ones to a growing catalog of actions including third-party systems like Amazon SQS and Kinesis, or the customer’s own servers.

• Intuitive UI. Both developers and non-developers benefit from an intuitive user interface that allows them to easily create integrations regardless of technical aptitude using a low-code/no-code approach.

• Reliable and scalable. Events & Actions is built to handle the volume of large scale applications so customers can reliably and cost-effectively filter events and trigger actions even when traffic spikes occur.

What can Events & Actions be used for?

The powerful event filtering capability and growing catalog of actions opens up a broad spectrum of new use cases for our customers.

Storage

• Archiving important real-time data (chat messages, auction bids, geo coordinates)

• Centralized storage for IoT sensor data

• Logging errors generated by users and devices

• Storing the last known location of users before they disconnect

Processing

• Routing important chat messages

• Sending critical events to a backend system for processing (auction “wins”)

• Gather data from client devices (e.g. number of steps) and store it in an external time-series database that populates a leaderboard

• Push notifications for users when a smart sensor data is out of specified range (anomaly detection)

Data analysis

• Sentiment analysis on chat messages

• Using chat messages to train an AI chatbot

• Reviewing of geolocation coordinates to ensure routing algorithm is operating correctly

What are the key capabilities of E&A?

Back in May, we released a free preview of Events & Actions. Since then, we’ve expanded the E&A capabilities to include these exciting new features for our customers:

• Event listener types:

  • Message Publish

  • More event types (coming soon)

• Filter types:

  • No filter

  • Basic filter

  • Advanced JSONPath

• Action types:

  • Webhook

  • Amazon SQS (NEW)

  • Amazon Kinesis (NEW)

  • Amazon S3 (coming soon)

• Other:

  • Custom headers

  • Configurable retry

  • Action feedback (NEW)

  • Batch delivery (coming soon)

Getting started with Events & Actions

If you’re ready to try Events & Actions, the free version allows you to create one event listener, one associated webhook action, and supports up to 1M events per month. Login to the PubNub Admin Portal and select Event and Actions from the left navigation bar to test it out. 

Want to learn more about how you can leverage Events & Actions? Register today for our upcoming webinar, Capture Important Real-Time Data with PubNub’s Events & Actions, on Wednesday, March 8th at 9:00 am PST / 12:00 pm EST!