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

Metabase on Elastic Beanstalk

One of the most popular services AWS offers is called EC2, and stands for Elastic Cloud Compute. You can think of these EC2 instances as virtualized servers, and they are building blocks for many of the other services offered. We will be running Metabase on one or more of these EC2 instances and connecting it to a Postgres application database.

While we could deploy these services individually and connect them up, doing so is not easy. This is where the Elastic Beanstalk service comes in handy, and that is what we will use to deploy our Metabase application. The Elastic Beanstalk service abstracts away a lot of the challenges in software deployment, like installing the software, provisioning the database, monitoring the service, and handling spikes in traffic. In that sense, Elastic Beanstalk is similar to Heroku.

Specifically, when we use Elastic Beanstalk to deploy Metabase, it will automatically do the following with just a little bit of configuration...