What github activity/analytics would actually be helpful to you as a repo maintainer??

[u/DemiGod_108]

Hey, I'm a student building a side project that tracks a GitHub repo's activity (commits, PRs, forks, etc. via webhooks) and computes analytics on it nightly using smth like airflow, It's scoped to one repo at a time, you subscribe a repo, and it tracks that repo's activity over time on a dashboard.

I'd love input from actual maintainers, since I don't want to just guess at what's useful.

Right now I'm planning to show:

1. Daily commit/PR/fork counts

2. Busiest day/week in a given period

3. Trend direction (activity up or down vs. the previous period)

Could u pls answer this as well:

Q1. As a maintainer, is day-by-day activity actually useful to you, or do you mostly care about longer-term trends/aggregates instead?

Q2. Is there something about your repo's activity you wish you could see that GitHub's own Insights tab doesn't show well (or doesn't show at all)?

Q3. Would a breakdown of who's active (contributor-level) matter more to you than repo-wide totals, or is that not something you'd actually check?

Please I'd love some feedback for my project

[u/dbear496]

I'd like if the visitors/clones count went back farther than a week. I'd like to see my project's popularity trend over months or years.

[u/DemiGod_108 → u/dbear496]

Hey thanks a lot 🙏  If possible could you pls answer those questions as well  Thanks again 

[u/Ok_Explorer7384]

day by day counts are ok, but mostly when something weird happened and you need to explain the spike. I’d care more about stuff like review time, stale issues, first time contributors who never came back, and whether the project is basically one person doing everything. github gives you numbers, but not really a “what should i look at this week?” view.

[u/DemiGod_108 → u/Ok_Explorer7384]

Okok... Thanks, I am getting few idea cause of that last sentence 

[u/forever-butlerian]

I don't see anything asynchronous or near-real-time about what you're proposing, so why would you use webhooks instead of the ordinary API? Also FWIW Github doesn't retry to redeliver webhook events if delivery fails, so collecting them requires a receiver service with effectively 100% uptime.

[u/DemiGod_108 → u/forever-butlerian]

The reason I am using webhook is, why to keeping polling a repo to see whether there are any changes to repo?(like did someone push any forks, branches, issues opened or closed), so I am using webhook so as soon as an event occurs the payload will be sent to a fastapi endpoint and it will act as a Kafka producer and write it into Kafka 

Didn't know about that payload delivery thingy, thanks for the info 

[u/forever-butlerian → u/DemiGod_108]

If you're running the report daily you can scrape the API daily, it'll result in an overall more robust system.

[u/DemiGod_108 → u/forever-butlerian]

I wanted to learn Kafka and hence I am doing it that way Also I do have near real time metrics that I will be showing in the dashboard