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 and deploying Metabase via the cloud

In the last section, we learned how to install Metabase locally on our computers. We also learned the limitations of running it locally. By installing and deploying to the cloud, we unlock Metabase's true power. Let's get started.

Running software in the cloud

The good news is that it is not too much more complicated to get Metabase running on a web server. Practically, this means that when you run Metabase on a web server and close up your laptop, Metabase will stay up and running (unlike a locally installed version).

While you could go out and buy a web server and plug it in at home, today that is rarely done. Running a server in your home or office is referred to as on-premises, or on-prem. Some organizations may have their own servers on-prem for security reasons but nowadays most servers are run in the cloud. Today you can pay companies including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google a very small amount of money and they...