So I wanted to see how my outreach was going. I wanted to not reach for the boring solutions that exist like everywhere, and keep everything AWS/Amplify. Would it work? Yes, yes it did work.

Here are the criteria:

• I want to have a low-cost, serverless solution
• I want to record hits on pages
• I want some basic demographics for user devices and browsers

Note: If you don’t care how I did it, you can explore the actual docs here AWS Amplify Analytics Docs

Here’s how I did it…

• First thing’s first, you gotta init the amplify backend.
• Then you need to update your app to publish “page hits” to the backend.
• That’s it.

Presuming you already have an amplify frontend with Gatsby, you need a backend. So, init the amplify backend.

amplify add analytics

You’ll get some config options. If you get concerned(as I did), it does use Cognito behind the scenes, but the permissions are unauthenticated access, by default.

Also, Pinpoint (the service behind these analytics) may not be available in the region your site is in. No worries, cross-region works just fine. I host this site in us-east-2 (Ohio), but my analytics are in us-east-1 (N. Virginia). You won’t notice any issues.

After you go through the prompts to configure all of it, run a push to get it out in the cloud working for you with:

amplify push

TO BE CONTINUED (with the gatsby code)…