As a sysadmin many moons ago, I had about 5 email servers under my purview. Considered mission critical, I had a monitoring dashboard on my computer running at all times such that certain colored or blinking lights would alert me to a potential issue.

Here I am again with a stack of cloud servers, so my monitoring muscles were twitching. PostHog scratched that itch. PostHog is an analytics platform; you instrument your code, define the events you want to track, and it surfaces that data in real-time dashboards. It’s the difference between flying blind and flying with instruments.

Getting PostHog into the stack wasn’t a one-session affair. The frontend instrumentation went in cleanly; events were flowing to the dashboard almost immediately. The backend was another story. A missing python-dotenv package meant my environment variables weren’t loading, and the server wouldn’t start. Simple fix in hindsight, annoying in the moment.

Once that was sorted, I built out two dashboards. One for me: response times, error rates, search performance, all with red/yellow/green health indicators. The other a simplified view for the dispensary owner: sessions, products added to lists, customer activity. Different audiences, different needs. Four sessions across nearly a month to get it all working the way I wanted.

The blinking lights are back. This time they’re watching the build and the customer experience simultaneously. Sysadmin Lisa is satisfied.