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

Serving Metabase over HTTPS

In Chapter 2, Hosting Metabase on AWS, when we deployed Metabase using Elastic Beanstalk on AWS, we set everything up so that our traffic is served over HTTP. Nowadays, almost all websites use HTTPS over HTTP. HTTPS is a secure version of HTTP, where traffic is encrypted using public-key encryption and SSL certificates. That means that HTTP is not encrypted, which means that requests and responses are sent in plaintext and can be eavesdropped on by third parties.

Since HTTPS is the industry standard these days and we're going to be dealing with sensitive data in Metabase, we should definitely use it. Let's learn how to set it up.

Creating an SSL certificate in AWS

AWS has a service called AWS Certificate Manager that lets you create Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates. What these certificates actually are is beyond the scope of this book. Before creating one, check to see whether your domain and subdomain already have one. If not,...