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

Installing Metabase locally

By far the easiest way to try out Metabase is to install it locally. Installing Metabase locally means that you are running the program from your own computer, rather than off some external server (for those unfamiliar with servers, you can think of them as computers that are always running and accessible via the internet). While running Metabase locally is not the ideal way to run Metabase, it was created to be perfect for beginners who just want to kick the tires, try it out, and gain familiarity with the product. I'll go into detail about its limitations later in this chapter, but for now, let's go ahead and install it.

Installing on Mac

To familiarize yourself with Metabase's website, head to https://www.metabase.com. There you'll see a Get Started button. Click that and you'll be taken to a page with all the various installation options, with their Metabase Cloud hosted version highlighted by default. Click the Host it...