An overview of your CometChat dashboard

Now that you’ve got yourself a CometChat account and you’ve created an App or two, you probably want to know what exactly you’re supposed to do inside the App! 

When you first create your App or click on an App from your account home page, you’ll be taken to the Dashboard. This is the brain of your App and the things you do here control how your App behaves out in production. So, just like you can change things in your code base and they will reflect in your production environment, you can also change things in your Dashboard and have them reflect in your production environment once you’ve deployed chat there. 

You’ll land on the Overview Page of the Dashboard first and this is where you can see your usage and analytics. You can see information on active users, concurrent users, and voice and video minutes for the month. You’ll also find a link to check your billing page where you can check your plan and change it if necessary as well as update payment information. 

The overview page also contains quick links to our integration methods - these are what you will use to actually build out and deploy your chat experience.

Over on the left hand side you’ll see a menu with lots of options. Credentials is where you can find and create your Auth Key and API Keys. 

The Manage section is where you will create your users and groups. This is also where you can create and manage roles for your users. Roles are based on permissions, and permissions range from the ability to start a chat to the ability to ban a user. Your App will automatically come with one default role, but you can create and restrict the roles of different users as you see fit.

You’ll see some Features listed on the menu that just take you to a page which says “contact us” - these are either Early Access features that are in a beta phase or they are features that require an add-on to your subscription. Fill out the form if you’d like more information. 

The Moderate section is where you can see details of your users’ chats and calls. This is where you can manage the safety and experience of your users by Kicking or Banning someone. 

The integrate section takes you to the same links you had shortcuts to on your Overview page - this is where the real magic happens when you go to our documentation and get started building chat for your users. Our chat widget is our low-code, easy to deploy, out-of-the-box chat functionality. UI Kits are component based and allow you to easily build out the chat experience you want with some control and customization. Our SDKs are fully available for you to build a completely custom experience and then build your own branded UI right on top. 

The Extend section is where you can control a lot of the user experience through Extensions and where you can create Webhooks. 

On the Extensions page you will find a full list of our extensions. Many can be enabled with one click, such as Emojis, simply enable it and now your users will see emojis on the UI. 

But other extensions will need more work. For example, Data Masking under the Moderation section. Even though you click Enable, you will still need to go into settings and tell the Extension how you want it to behave. You may want to mask ten digit phone numbers, or you may want to mask social security numbers. And you may want to drop the messages completely, or just mask the info with asterisks. We encourage you to explore the entire Extensions list, and if at any point you try to enable something that doesn’t come with your plan, just contact sales to get it added! 

Finally, the Settings section is where you can manage your own internal team members and is also another way to get to your Plans and Billings page. Members are different from users, Members are people on your team like admins or moderators or developers who you want to have access to this Dashboard to help you build or manage your Chat.