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

Using MetaBot in Slack

In the last section, we saw how we can use Slack to send out pulses. You may recall how, in Chapter 3, Setting Up Metabase, we set up MetaBot, our Metabase Slack bot. At the time, since we didn't have any saved questions, there was not much we could do with MetaBot. Now that we have a lot of saved questions, it's time to see some examples of what MetaBot can do.

You can interact with MetaBot either by chatting directly with it or by adding it to one of your channels. Chatting directly with MetaBot is a helpful way to fetch Metabase questions quickly, without needing to access Metabase. Having MetaBot in a channel is helpful in facilitating data-driven discussions. We'll see examples of both, but first, let's learn how MetaBot works.

Discovering MetaBot's features

To see what MetaBot can do, go to Slack, click on the Metabot app, and type metabot help. MetaBot will respond with Here's what I can do: help, list, show:

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