Building a Developer Marketing Dashboard with Grafana

The Story of PostHog's Marketing Evolution

When James Hawkins started PostHog, he needed clear visibility into how developers were discovering and engaging with their product. The team initially struggled with scattered data across GitHub stars, website analytics, and product usage. They built a Grafana dashboard to centralize their marketing metrics, which became crucial in their journey to over 100,000 users. This dashboard helped them identify that their documentation was driving significant traffic and adoption, leading them to invest more in technical content.

Why Build a Developer Marketing Dashboard?

A centralized marketing dashboard helps you understand how developers find and interact with your product. By tracking metrics in one place, you can make data-driven decisions about where to focus your marketing efforts.

Setting Up Your Grafana Dashboard

Let's build a dashboard that tracks key developer marketing metrics. We'll use product usage analytics as our foundation.

Step 1: Data Sources Setup

Configure these essential data sources:

• PostgreSQL for user data and product metrics
• Prometheus for real-time system metrics
• Google Analytics API for website traffic
• GitHub API for repository engagement

Step 2: Key Metrics Configuration

Set up panels for:

• Daily active developers
• Documentation page views
• GitHub stars and forks
• Time to first API call
• Developer signup sources

Step 3: Creating Visualization Panels

Build these essential views:

• Developer journey funnel
• Technical content performance
• Community engagement metrics
• API usage patterns

Making Data-Driven Decisions

Use your dashboard to identify what's working. Link your custom developer marketing analytics to actual business outcomes.

Optimizing Your Dashboard

Keep refining based on:

• Most visited documentation pages
• Popular API endpoints
• Developer feedback patterns
• Conversion bottlenecks

Integration with Growth Systems

Connect your dashboard with your activity-based growth triggers to automate responses to key metrics changes.

Extra Tip: Custom Alerts

Set up Grafana alerts for:

• Sudden drops in API usage
• Spikes in documentation errors
• Changes in signup patterns
• Unusual traffic patterns

Start With Documentation

Create a simple system to document every support interaction. Use minimum viable processes to ensure consistency without overwhelming your team.

Build Support-Development Bridges

Set up regular meetings between support and development teams. Share support insights using customized dashboards to keep everyone aligned.

Test Solutions Quickly

Use feature flags to test solutions with small user groups before full rollout. This reduces risk and accelerates learning.

Measure Impact

Track how your solutions affect support volume and user satisfaction. Implement customer health scoring to measure improvement.

Start With Documentation

Create a simple system to document every support interaction. Use minimum viable processes to ensure consistency without overwhelming your team.

Build Support-Development Bridges

Set up regular meetings between support and development teams. Share support insights using customized dashboards to keep everyone aligned.

Test Solutions Quickly

Use feature flags to test solutions with small user groups before full rollout. This reduces risk and accelerates learning.

Measure Impact

Track how your solutions affect support volume and user satisfaction. Implement customer health scoring to measure improvement.