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

Setting up alerts

With Metabase, you can create alerts for any question. Alerts are trigger-based and will notify you either in Slack or via email. I find them to be most helpful for telling you when you've reached a goal, or when some special event happens. Let's learn about both types.

Goal-based alerts

To create a goal-based alert, start by opening the Total Orders Placed (with Goal) question we created in the last section. In the bottom-right corner of the page, find the bell symbol. Hovering over it reveals the text Get alerts. Click the bell. You'll be taken to the page pictured in Figure 7.14:

Figure 7.14 – Setting up an alert for our goal-based question

Figure 7.14 – Setting up an alert for our goal-based question

On the Let's set up your alert page, we can configure exactly how we want our alert to be configured. For our needs, the default options are perfect. With these options, we'll get an alert when the progress bar reaches the goal of 200,000. We could also get...