Are you a fan of good-looking graphs? We’ve got them!

Hello everyone! A couple of weeks ago I made a tool for Lemmy instance admins to export statistics from a Lemmy Postgres database over to InfluxDB, which is a database that specializes in time-series based data. The idea being to allow people to track stats about their instance (such as the amount of comments, posts, etc that it knows about) over time.

I’ve put together a Grafana instance for The Outpost, and a dashboard is available here to allow everyone to get an overview on how things are looking over here. I try to be as transparent as possible when providing services that others use, so I have no problem with this being public.

There is no sensitive data, the InfluxDB source itself only has totals/counts - for example, it “knows” how many comments have been made by people on this instance, but it doesn’t know who made those comments. That data is only known to Lemmy itself, and its own database which cannot be connected to from the outside world.

I also do not mind the dashboard link being passed around to others, which probably doesn’t need to be explicitly stated for obvious reasons (if its on the internet, its already public by nature of the internet) but I figured I’d do so just in case!

The metrics at the top section (labeled “Extras”) should be taken with a grain of salt, as I’m definitely not a statistics expert so putting those functions together to get that data is purely a “best guess” at how to calculate those (more so the second row - “Rate of Incoming Comments”, and “Avg # of New Comments/Posts Every 5m” as the heatmaps are pretty easy and self-explanatory to put together).

For some reason the breakdown charts under the Registration section don’t render correctly on the public/unauthenticated version of the dashboard (along with the “nice” labels I’ve set on all of the graphs on that page) but they’re just pie charts of the user/email overview charts that they are right next to. Public Dashboards in Grafana are considered a beta feature so I suspect its just a bug.

Just to make sure the backend metrics database doesn’t get inadvertently slammed, the unauthenticated version of the dashboard is set to only auto-refresh every 5 minutes but manually refreshing the page will pull updated versions of all the stats in case you’re curious about how it changes on a minute basis (the data is only exported from Lemmy->Influx every minute, so refreshing the page every 30 seconds for example won’t really have any effect).

I also have totally not spent a large amount of time having this dashboard open on my second monitor just watching the numbers, colors, and graphs change - that would be silly! It would also be incredibly silly for me to encourage you to do the same thing!

I’ll skip pinning this post as its not really a critical announcement, but nonetheless if you have any questions about this I’m happy to answer them for you!