Book Image

Metabase Up and Running

By : Tim Abraham
Book Image

Metabase Up and Running

By: Tim Abraham

Overview of this book

Metabase is an open source business intelligence tool that helps you use data to answer questions about your business. This book will give you a detailed introduction to using Metabase in your organization to get the most value from your data. You’ll start by installing and setting up Metabase on your local computer. You’ll then progress to handling the administration aspect of Metabase by learning how to configure and deploy Metabase, manage accounts, and execute administrative tasks such as adding users and creating permissions and metadata. Complete with examples and detailed instructions, this book shows you how to create different visualizations, charts, and dashboards to gain insights from your data. As you advance, you’ll learn how to share the results with peers in your organization and cover production-related aspects such as embedding Metabase and auditing performance. Throughout the book, you’ll explore the entire data analytics process—from connecting your data sources, visualizing data, and creating dashboards through to daily reporting. By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to implement Metabase as an integral tool in your organization.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: Installing and Deploying Metabase
4
Section 2: Setting Up Your Instance and Asking Questions of Your Data
12
Section 3: Advanced Functionality and Paid Features

Creating a simple dashboard

As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, a dashboard is simply a curated collection of interactive questions arranged on a single screen. Once you know what questions you'd like to curate for a dashboard, the process of actually creating one is very simple. Let's learn how, using some of the questions we have already created. Let's imagine that this dashboard is intended to give its viewers the most high-level understanding of the health of the business – a sort of executive summary. Some questions that might work well for this dashboard are related to the following:

  • Order growth
  • User growth
  • Revenue growth

To create this dashboard, click the large + button in the top blue bar and select New dashboard from the menu, as in Figure 8.1:

Figure 8.1 – Creating a new dashboard

Figure 8.1 – Creating a new dashboard

A modal will pop up, asking for a name and description:

  1. Under Name, write Executive Summary...