Howdy! 👋

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A fine thing happened recently: Obisidian v1.0.0 was released. Which I discovered through this hacker news post. The comment section on Hacker News are usually 💰 and this one was no exception, here is a quote from the top comment:

Finally, a note taking application with a decent API that's allowed me to extract metadata and publish metrics into CloudWatch, allowing me to track key metrics and graphically[0] review historical trends of my "second brain." Previous note taking applications I've tried in the past (e.g. Zettlr, Bear) lacked the vibrant developer community that Obsidian has cultivated.

👆 Posts like this keep me coming back to Hacker News. Also, game recognises game. Here’s a link their blog post explaining the full stack and pipeline.

I bet you are sat there saying what if we could do something similar, but using only self hosted tools?

Well you, friend, are in luck.

Beginning the yak shaving

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Here is the flow I came up with for this experiment.

My daily template in Obsidian autopopulates the #unprocessed tag. In theory these are processed daily, however, in practise that frequently doesn’t happen.

This is the stack:

First things first, we need a program which can expose the unprocessed notes as a prometheus compatible metric. Follow the link to get instructions on how to set that up.

Consuming the data

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I already have Prometheus, Alert Manager and Grafana running in my network, however, the example directory contains a docker-compose example in case you want to get up and running quickly.

You’ll need to make a few changes to the alertmanager config and possibly check the prometheus scrape config too.

Next Steps

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• The exporter could be extended to show more metrics from your vault.
• I’d also consider removoing the additional prom stack and use something like this library instead.
• Grafana Dashboard for the truly insane who wish to graph their note history.