Sendgrid Source

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Take your company’s analysis to the next level by adding Sendgrid as a Source to Segment. Segment automatically collects events like Click or Delivered and objects such as Recipients or Campaigns and load them into your data warehouse. 

Getting Started

1. From the Source catalog page in your Segment workspace, enter “Sendgrid” and select the Sendgrid source that appears.

2. From the Sendgrid information panel that appears, click Add source.

3. Give the Source a name and add any labels to help you organize and filter your sources. You can give the source any name, but Segment recommends a name that reflects the source itself, as this name autopopulates the schema name. For example, the source name Sendgrid creates the schema sendgrid. You can add multiple instances if you have multiple SendGrid accounts.

4. Provide your API Key. In order to pull information about your contacts, we’ll make requests to SendGrid’s API with our sync component. You can create an API Key by navigating to Settings > API Keys, clicking General API Key.

You will then be prompted to name that key and given the option to adjust the settings. We recommend providing read permissions for Email Activity and Marketing Activity.

1. Finally, copy the resulting API Key into the Segment interface, taking care to trim any errant trailing spaces from copying and pasting, and press connect.

1. Copy the auto-generated Webhook URL and paste it into SendGrid’s Event Notification settings pane under Settings > Mail Settings.

1. Once you enable the Event Notification, you’re good to go! Press Next, and then Finish to wrap up the set up flow.

Event URL

SendGrid has a single Event URL location. By using the SendGrid source, you will be using your only Event URL location. If you remove a pre-existing URL, then that location will no longer receive events.

Components

Sync

SendGrid has a sync component, which means we’ll make requests to their API on your behalf on a 3 hour interval to pull the latest data into Segment. In the initial sync, we’ll grab all the SendGrid objects (and their corresponding properties) according to the Collections Table below. Note: If you don’t use Sendgrid’s marketing campaigns features, these collections will be empty in Sendgrid and you’ll see “Zero data synced” in your runs. The webhook will still be processing activity data (but only activity data) for you though!

Our sync component gets resources from SendGrid and forwards them to Segment using an upsert API, so the dimensional data in your warehouse loaded will reflect the latest state of the corresponding resource in SendGrid. For example, if lists.recipient_count goes from 100 to 200 between syncs, on its next flush to your warehouse, that tickets status will be 200.

The source syncs and warehouse syncs are independent processes. Source runs pull your data into the Segment Hub, and warehouse runs flush that data to your warehouse. Sources will sync with Segment every 3 hours. Depending on your Warehouses plan, we will push the Source data to your warehouse on the interval associated with your billing plan.

At the moment, we don’t support filtering which objects or properties get synced. If you’re interested in this feature, let us know!

Streaming

The SendGrid source also has a streaming component which listens in real time for inbound webhooks from SendGrid’s Event Notifications and batches the events to be uploaded on your next warehouse flush. These events are only ever appended to your warehouse. Note, if you don’t use SendGrid’s marketing features, this will be the only data that we receive from SendGrid. At present, there is no way to retrieve email event history from SendGrid, so you will only have access to data that we’ve collected after you successfully enable this component of the source destination.

Collections

Collections are the groupings of resources we pull from your source. In your warehouse, each collection gets its own table.

Object collections are updated with each sync. These are pulled using our sync component.

Event collections are append only, represent a user action or activity, and may be likened to fact tables in a traditional data warehouse.

Troubleshooting

If you’re getting an “Invalid Credentials” error when setting up the SendGrid source, send a direct ping to the SendGrid Marketing Campaigns API to test if you’re using the correct credentials.

Make sure you whitelist the Segment IP addresses on Sendgrid. contact our team for the list of IP addresses to whitelist.