InsightsTrack + Pulse: I taught Claude Desktop to read my web analytics (via MCP)

The dual-database core

InsightsTrack writes every tracking event to PostgreSQL and streams it into DuckDB, an embedded columnar engine. All analytics reads hit DuckDB — 90-day queries answer in tens of milliseconds, in-process, with no separate query cluster. Writes go to Postgres, reads come from DuckDB. That separation is what makes it fast and cheap to self-host.

Pulse: one tool registry, two front doors

The interesting decision was not building the AI assistant and the MCP integration as two separate things. There's one registry of 17 read-only tools (get_kpi, get_top_pages, get_funnel, get_realtime, list_sites, …). That single registry powers:

1. 
   The in-dashboard Pulse panel — a streaming chat loop that lets an LLM call the tools and renders each result as a chart/table/KPI card.


2. 
   MCP — the exact same tools, exposed to external clients.

Because both surfaces share the registry, an answer is consistent everywhere and I only maintain the tools once.

MCP: two transports