Many community maintained MediaWiki gadgets don't have a practical way to understand how users are actually using them or to debug issues when something goes wrong. When bugs are reported, maintainers usually rely on anecdotal reports.

At the same time, WMF already has well-established systems for observability and debugging in other areas: Wikimedia-Logstash, Test Kitchen Event-Platform. Gadgets, however, are mostly outside of this ecosystem. As a result, it is hard for gadget authors to answer basic questions like how often a feature is used, which options users select, or what path led to a problematic result. For example, I have a gadget that suggests categories based on content from multiple language versions of a wiki, it is currently difficult to see which source language or wiki contributed to a bad suggestion that a user picked. This makes it harder to find and block low-quality sources (wikis).

It would be useful to have a simple, privacy-friendly way for gadget authors to get basic usage and debugging information. This could be aggregated metrics, opt-in debugging mode, or a lightweight instrumentation API for gadgets.