Howdy! 👋

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

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

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

• 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.