We wanted to answer a simple question: is anyone actually downloading and running PIM? Not a vanity number — just something to tell us whether the work of the last two months is reaching anyone at all. It turned out to be harder to find out than to build.
GitLab, where PIM’s releases live, tracks nothing about download counts — not for release assets, not for anything in the Package Registry, on any tier. That’s not a setting we missed; it’s a long-open, still-unresolved feature request other people have been asking GitLab for. The closest thing GitLab does expose is a clone/pull count through its Project Statistics API, and even that comes with real limits: HTTPS clones only (no SSH), a rolling 30-day window with no history, and no UI anywhere that actually shows it — API-only.
Ollama Cloud, which some PIM setups lean on for AI, has the same shape of gap. There’s a Usage tab in its own web settings, session-by-session and week-by-week, but no admin or team view, and no API to pull it programmatically — another open, unresolved feature request. knoden.com itself has zero analytics instrumented at all right now, so even the most basic “did anyone visit the download page” question has no answer today.
None of this is a PIM problem to fix — it’s a knoden.com/infrastructure gap, and the fix looks like
one small stack rather than three separate dashboards nobody would actually check. A self-hosted
analytics tool for knoden.com’s own page views. A redirect endpoint — something like
get.knoden.com/pim/<platform> — that logs an event and only then bounces to the real GitLab
release URL, since that’s the only way to get an actual download count when GitLab itself won’t
track one. And a small recurring job that polls GitLab’s 30-day clone count and archives it as a
trend line over time, since the rolling window makes any day-over-day comparison noisy on its own.
The honest state of this right now is a written spec, not shipped infrastructure — the next real step, not something to claim credit for yet. But it’s worth writing down even at the plan stage: the two platforms PIM depends on most for reaching people genuinely can’t answer “is this working,” and that’s worth knowing on its own, independent of whenever the dashboard itself gets built.