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 pulses

So far in this chapter, we've focused on dashboards as the primary way to communicate high-level, business-critical findings. Dashboards are fantastic tools, and I've known a lot of people to find dashboards so useful that they make opening them up part of their morning routine – potentially having a glance even before their morning cup of coffee. This is especially true for people in executive roles who need to have easy and constant access to the data.

Perhaps even more convenient than a good dashboard, though, is a daily email report. In Metabase parlance, these would be called pulses. Pulses, like dashboards, are comprised of one or more questions. Unlike dashboards, which you need to go to Metabase to view, a pulse is composed and sent out via email or by Slack. Most pulses are sent daily, but you can create pulses to be sent hourly, weekly, or monthly as well. Let's learn how to make one:

  1. To create a pulse, click the large + button...