Metabase: The Ideal Open Source Tool to Create Dashboards and Leverage Your Data

In this article, we will quickly introduce Metabase, a powerful open-source business intelligence tool, along with our use of it at Premier Octet.

What is Metabase?

Metabase is an open-source analysis and visualization solution that allows you to easily create dashboards. It simplifies the exploration of information and displays the results in various formats: charts, detailed tables, or key indicators.

Some features provided by Metabase:

• Interactive Dashboards: Visualize your data in the form of interactive and dynamic graphs.
• Intuitive Query Builder: You have an intuitive no-code interface, in the form of questions, to build SQL queries.
• Support for multiple data sources: Metabase adapts with a wide range of data sources (MySQL, PostgreSQL, CSV, MongoDB, etc.)
• Sharing of results: You can subscribe to alerts or share results when a goal is achieved and thus send notifications on Slack or by email.
• Authentication and permissions management: Metabase handles authentication (Google SSO or custom authentication based on JWT) as well as user group permissions to manage access to data finely and securely. You can define roles and restrict access to certain databases, dashboards or queries depending on user needs.
• Self-hosting or cloud: Deploy Metabase on your servers or use their simplified cloud hosting solution.
• REST API: You have a comprehensive API to allow you a more flexible and advanced use of Metabase, for example in headless mode.

Why use Metabase?

An intuitive interface

Metabase offers several advantages for querying your data. The first being its intuitive interface, a very simplified version of a SQL query builder, ideal for beginners. But it also offers the possibility for more experienced users to read data directly with a native language (SQL). Whether you are an analyst, developer or even salesperson, the tool adapts to your needs and your level of expertise.

Open source

Metabase is open source and can be easily self-hosted, which allows total flexibility in terms of deployment. The vast majority of its features are free.

Example of creating a chart

I will use a concrete example to present the Metabase interface.

I want to have a visualization of my store orders over several months. I would like to present a chart that shows the evolution of my store's revenue over the year.

First, I start by creating a new question in Metabase then I choose a starting data source, here my orders table.

Next, in the question creation interface, I select the columns I want to use for my chart, here total and created_at.

For all my orders entries, I want to sum of total to have the total revenue and group them by month. In the Summarize section, I use the Sum function and I choose the total column.

Then, in the Group by section, I choose created_at and Month.

Finally, I click on the Visualize button and I get my chart.

It is also easily possible to create series of charts. And thus compare several questions on the same chart.

It only took a few clicks to create this chart and integrate it into a dashboard, without having to write a line of code. Also, even though the interface requires a minimum knowledge of the data it remains very accessible, even for a novice.

Once the chart is created, a third party can view, modify, or share it.

Our use of Metabase at Premier Octet

the challenge:

At Premier Octet, we manage many internal projects, some of which are open source. We needed a tool that offers clear visibility on their performance. This initiative pushed us to look for a solution capable of aggregating and presenting these data in a readable way.

Ideally, this tool had to be open source, reliable, collaborative, and without any additional costs.

The result:

Metabase has allowed us to centralize the performance monitoring of all our projects in one place, in self-hosted mode. Moreover, by exploiting the API, we have developed a custom interface, optimized for dynamic display on screens in our offices.

Conclusion

With Metabase, it is very simple to integrate a dashboard into your projects so that you and your team can monitor and share your performances in real time. Thanks to its intuitive interface you don't need to be a data expert to get a hang of the tool. And if you wish, you can also use the Metabase API to display data headlessly in a completely custom-built interface.