Metabase

Business Intelligence (BI) for Vaultside

Overview

• Why BI?
• What is Metabase?
• What can we do with it?
• Examples
• Slack Functionality
• What Next?
• Conclusion...

Why BI?

• Currently have limited data generated as reports
  • Nothing that would qualify as Business Intelligence
• Ad hoc reporting is heavily manual
• Adding built-in charts/graphs to DocumentVault would be a huge lift
• Successful rebranding, repricing and advertising requires metrics/analysis

What is Metabase?

• Web Application providing BI functionality
  • Cloud-based (costs money)
  • Self-hosted (free - this is what we're using)
• Supports a wide variety of data sources
• Good tools for "asking questions"
• Good visualization tools
• Supports scheduled reporting via Email and/or Slack
• Provides a Slack bot to request dashboards, reports

What can we do with it?

• Connect to our primary data sources (MySQL and Mongo)
• Create reports/visualizations (e.g. Ask Questions)
• Create Dashboards highlighting sets of Questions
• Share Dashboards/Questions via a link
• Periodically send out Questions via email or Slack (Pulses)

Examples: Dashboards

Examples: Dashboard...

Examples: QUestions

Slack Functionality

• Pulses can target...
  • Specific channels
  • Specific users
• #metabase_files channel is not for humans
  • It's where the bot stores files
  • It's a quirk of the slack bot API
• The Slack bot can request questions/dashboards
  • See examples

Slack Bot: Help

Slack Bot: list

Slack bot: Show

slack bot: show

What Next?

• Identify and Prioritize Questions
• Identify Information to Share w/OnlyCo
• Determine questions to be "Pulsed" and at what frequency
• Determine how team wants to access the data

Identify questions

• There are currently about 20 questions defined
  • Not all are suitable moving forward
  • Some cleanup may be required
• Highest priority: those that can help with rebranding/pricing transition
• Phrase questions so they are always current
• Use moving averages to identify trends

Sharing w/OnlyCo

• Determine what info - if any - we should share
• Provide public links to specific information (dashboard or question)
  • No Metabase user needs to be defined
  • The linked pages have a refresh button to update
  • The links can be revoked if/when necessary

Identify Pulses

• What data should be sent out on schedule?
• What medium should be used (email/Slack)

Metabase Access

• We can define groups of users with specific permissions
  • Data (db access)
  • Collections (questions, dashboards)
• Slack bot can be restricted as well (it's its own group)
• What team members need Metabase users defined?
• Who should be able to create questions/access data bases?

Conclusion

• The evaluation of Metabase has gone really well
  • No major issues
• Beware the video game effect
  • There's a lot we can do; we need to prioritize
  • It's easy to sit there and think of new questions (playing)
• Some questions are easy; others require effort
  • Organizing the data (the query) is one thing
  • Visualizing it is another thing

Conclusion

• We may need to enhance our data collection
• We may need to create additional views in the reporting DB
  • Enhance performance
  • Better organize the data
• Want to avoid hitting the production DB directly
  • Performance
  • Security
  • Don't want to expose customer data

Conclusion

• It's so cool: metabase.vaultside.com