Streams: real-time events in Slack, not in tomorrow morning report
Scheduled reports cover the heartbeat. Some things cannot wait for the morning. Streams push events into Slack the moment they happen, so the channel reacts in real time, not in hindsight.
Streams: real-time events in Slack, not in tomorrow morning report
Scheduled reports are great. They cover most of what a team needs — the steady, daily heartbeat of the business. But some things genuinely can't wait for the 9am pulse.
A record-breaking order. A failed payment. A sudden spike in sign-ups. By the time those show up in tomorrow's scheduled report, the moment to react — to celebrate it, to fix it, to ride it — has already passed. A daily cadence is the wrong tool for an event that mattered for an hour.
Push the moment, not the summary
A Stream is the real-time counterpart to a scheduled Pulse. Instead of firing on a clock, it fires on an event. The instant something happens in a connected source, the Stream pushes it into Slack.
A new Shopify order lands in the channel as it's placed — not aggregated into tomorrow's revenue chart, but right then, while it's still a live moment the team can react to. The channel becomes a feed of things actually happening, not a digest of things that already did.
When real-time is the right call
Not everything deserves to interrupt people, and that's worth being honest about. Streams earn their place for events where the timing is the value:
- Big orders — the wins worth seeing live, the ones that build momentum in the channel.
- Failures — a failed payment or a problem you'd rather catch in minutes than discover in a report.
- Spikes — a surge in activity you can only act on while it's happening.
For everything else — the daily trend, the weekly review — a scheduled Pulse is still the right tool. Real-time is a scalpel, not a firehose.
Heartbeat and alarm
The combination is the point. Scheduled Pulses give you the heartbeat: the reliable, regular read on how things are trending. Streams give you the alarm: the immediate signal when something happens that can't wait.
Run them together and your Slack channel covers both halves of the job — the steady rhythm and the urgent moment — without anyone refreshing a dashboard for either.
Set up a Stream free at chartcastr.com.
