obsidian-grafana

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

obsidian-grafana turns an Obsidian vault into time-series data and dashboards. I work at Grafana Labs, helping people monitor their systems with open source tools, and at some point I realized I could use the same tools to monitor my personal knowledge management system. It’s a nerdy and totally unnecessary setup, and I enjoy it a lot. I mention it in my post on how I use visuals in my PKM.

The screenshot above was made by running the repo’s own Grafana setup on a copy of the posts from this website.

How it works

A Python script reads the Markdown files in your vault and extracts metadata: word, line, and character counts, file size, frontmatter fields, tags, wikilinks, and timestamps. It runs every five minutes and has two paths:

A log path for history. Only the notes that changed since the last run are written, as structured JSON, to a log file. Grafana Alloy tails that file and forwards it to Loki, with tags and frontmatter fields as labels, so you can see how your notes change over time.
A metrics path for the current state. A metrics exporter exposes totals such as note count, word count, unique tags, and wikilinks, and Prometheus scrapes them.

Grafana ties the two together with pre-configured dashboards: an overview, a time series dashboard for individual notes, a relationships dashboard for wikilinks, a dashboard of frontmatter types, and a word cloud of your most used words. Everything runs in Docker Compose.

What it’s useful for

Understanding your writing habits and how your vault grows, checking how consistently your notes are tagged, finding the notes that everything links to, and keeping an eye on notes with a given frontmatter status or priority. The README also covers installing the Grafana Assistant plugin into the local Grafana.

Try it

The repository has a quick start. You’ll need Docker and Python 3, and a vault to point it at.

Cartography of the Deep: Distributed Tracing for Testing (Romanian Testing Conference)

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 12:24:02 -0700

I presented a talk today at the Romanian Testing Conference 2024 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania! My talk was called “Cartography of the Deep: Distributed Tracing for Testing” and it covered how to tie in distributed tracing into tests to get a better understanding of your system under test.

Here are my slides!

Abstract

From the Scandinavian Kraken that drags entire ships to their early graves to the Philippine Bakunawa said to rise from the waters to swallow the moon, our existential fears about what lurks at the bottom of our own oceans has inspired us to create hundreds of folkloric monsters across cultures. We’ve charted the surface of our planet, but the vast majority of the ocean floor remains a mystery.

The mysterious depths of modern software architectures makes it difficult for us to test a system for performance and reliability. The easy solution? Unmanned underwater probes: send inputs to the system, and judge its state based on the outputs that return. But this method is often too limited to tell us what’s really going on when something goes wrong. What if there were a way to make our tests themselves more observable?