PostHog is a lot of power, but to get the most from it, we should review the key ideas about how it all works.
Properties
Properties show up on many PostHog data types. They're a great way to sift through large volumes of user activity, segment behavior and users, and otherwise make sense of your data.
Events
Events are the breadcrumbs of user activity.
They show you what happened, when it happened, and who it happened to.
Events have properties, and you can use these to filter and query them. PostHog will gather several automatically, and you can add your own as well.
Actions
Actions are a layer on top of events. Define actions to aggregate multiple events, extract a specific kind of event according to its properties, or give an event a more useful name.
Sessions
A session is a stream of events corresponding to a specific usage session of a product. Sessions have properties, and you can query them.
Persons
This is a real person who uses a product. A person has a stream of events associated with their profile, along with a history of sessions. Like events and sessions, they have properties. Some are automatically gathered, and product-specific properties can be attached as part of an integration.
Cohorts
A cohort gathers person profiles. You can create cohorts manually, or generate them by building queries against person properties or events.
Groups
Groups enable reporting on subsets of your users, for example, all users from a given company using a product.
Data model
Dig into the data model to understand more about data types and how they're related.