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

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