I built three sites. All on GitHub Pages. All costing $0 to run. And I had absolutely no idea if anyone was actually using them.

They all worked. GitHub Actions deployed them. DNS resolved. SSL certs were valid. Cool.

But like… were people visiting? Which pages? From where? Was the site actually fast or just fast for me on my gigabit connection in Seattle?

I had no fuckin clue.

Love Me Some $Free.99

I’d been meaning to set up monitoring for a while. But every time I looked into it, the options were:

Then I actually read the Grafana Cloud free tier limits:

For free. Forever.

For three small side projects? That’s basically infinite.

The Goal

I wanted to know:

  1. Is the site up? (uptime monitoring)
  2. How fast is it actually loading? (real user metrics)
  3. Where are people coming from? (geographic data)
  4. What are they actually looking at? (page views)
  5. Which buttons are people clicking on littlelink? (dopamine)

And I wanted all of this in a single pane of glass.

Because why not.

Setting Up Grafana Cloud

Step 1: Create account

Go to grafana.com, sign up for free tier. They don’t even ask for a credit card. Respect.

Step 2: Create a stack

Give it a name (I went with betatrenigma because BETA was the first thing I wanted to monitor). Pick a region close to you.

You get:

All preconfigured. Just works.

Synthetic Monitoring: Is It Actually Up?

First priority: uptime checks. I want to know if my sites go down before someone tells me on Mastodon.

In Grafana Cloud:

  1. Go to Synthetic Monitoring
  2. Click Add new check
  3. Configure:
    • Job name: beta-trenigma-dev
    • Target: https://beta.trenigma.dev
    • Check type: HTTP
    • Probe locations: London, North Virginia, Oregon (global coverage!)
    • Frequency: 60s
    • Timeout: 10s

Hit save. Repeat for blog and littlelink.

Now I’ve got:

Total setup time: 5 minutes.

GitHub Pages uptime is stupidly good. All three sites? 100% uptime. Always green. North Virginia responds in ~24ms, Oregon in ~50ms, London in ~100ms.

It’s almost boring. But boring is good.

Faro RUM: Real User Monitoring

Synthetic checks tell you if the site is up. But they don’t tell you how fast it actually loads for real people on real connections.

Enter Faro: Grafana’s Real User Monitoring SDK.

For each site, I created a Faro app:

In Grafana Cloud → Frontend Observability → Connect new app

This gives you a collector URL and a script snippet.

Add the snippet to your site’s <head>:

<script>
(function () {
  var webSdkScript = document.createElement("script");
  
  webSdkScript.src =
    "https://unpkg.com/@grafana/faro-web-sdk@2/dist/bundle/faro-web-sdk.iife.js";
  
  webSdkScript.onload = () => {
    window.GrafanaFaroWebSdk.initializeFaro({
      url: "https://faro-collector-prod-us-west-0.grafana.net/collect/YOUR_ID",
      app: {
        name: "beta-trenigma-dev",
        version: "1.0.0",
        environment: "production",
      },
    });
  };
  
  document.head.appendChild(webSdkScript);
})();
</script>

Commit. Push. Wait 5 minutes.

Now I can see:

And the data is actually interesting:

The Dopamine Metric: Button Click Tracking

For littlelink, I wanted to know which buttons people actually click.

Like, are people going to my blog? BETA? Ko-fi? (lol, probably not Ko-fi)

Faro lets you send custom events. So I added this to littlelink:

// Track button clicks
window.addEventListener('load', () => {
  setTimeout(() => {
    if (window.GrafanaFaroWebSdk && window.GrafanaFaroWebSdk.faro) {
      const faro = window.GrafanaFaroWebSdk.faro;
      
      document.querySelectorAll('.link-button').forEach(button => {
        button.addEventListener('click', (e) => {
          const buttonName = e.currentTarget.querySelector('span').textContent;
          const buttonUrl = e.currentTarget.getAttribute('href');
          
          faro.api.pushEvent('button_click', {
            button_name: buttonName,
            button_url: buttonUrl
          });
          
          console.log('Tracked click:', buttonName);
        });
      });
    }
  }, 1000);
});

Now every button click sends an event to Grafana with:

And I can build charts showing:

Early results: BETA button gets clicked the most. Blog is second. Ko-fi… yeah, nobody clicks Ko-fi. But that’s fine. It’s there.

This is the dopamine metric. Watching that click counter go up? Feels good.

Building the Unified Dashboard

Now I’ve got data. Time to make it actually useful.

Goal: One dashboard. All three sites. Single pane of glass.

I built a dashboard called trenigma-sites with 8 rows:

Row 1: Overview

Row 2: BETA

Row 3: Blog

Row 4: Geographic Breakdown

Row 5: littlelink

Row 6: RUM - Page Views

Row 7: RUM - Performance Metrics

Row 8: littlelink Button Clicks

All the queries are PromQL hitting the Grafana Cloud Prometheus endpoint. Faro data flows through the same system.

Auto-refresh: 30 seconds.

Is it necessary? Absolutely not.

Is it cool as fuck? Yes.

Does it make me feel like I’m running a real operation instead of three side projects on GitHub Pages? Also yes.

What This Actually Costs

Grafana Cloud free tier:

Total monthly cost for production-grade monitoring: $0

Compare that to Datadog at $15/host or New Relic at $99/month.

What I Actually Learned

Grafana Cloud’s free tier is genuinely good. Not “free but useless.” Actually useful. I kept expecting to hit a limit and I haven’t.

Once I could see page views I started caring more about writing. Once I could see click counts on littlelink I actually updated it. Metrics create accountability even when it’s just you holding yourself to it.

GitHub Pages is fast. Like, really fast. 100% uptime, sub-100ms response times globally. For free. Wild.

BETA is getting page views. Blog posts get read. People click through from littlelink. Not huge numbers but they’re real people, and knowing that feels good.

Setting This Up Yourself

If you want to replicate this:

1. Sign up for Grafana Cloud (free tier)

2. Add Faro RUM to your sites:

3. Set up Synthetic Monitoring:

4. Build a dashboard:

5. (Optional) Set up a TV NOC:

What’s Next

Now that I have monitoring, I can actually make data-driven decisions:

Plus I want to add:

But the core is done. Three sites, full monitoring, one dashboard, $0/month.

Current stack:

Monthly cost: ~$0 Monitoring coverage: 100%
Dopamine from watching metrics: Priceless

If you’re running side projects and have no idea if anyone uses them, set up monitoring. It takes an hour. It costs nothing. And you’ll actually know if your work matters.

Now go build your personal NOC. You know you want to. 📊🔥