Year 2 - Data visualization

• Account settings.
• Admin.
• Activity.
• Help.
• About Metabase.
• Sign out.

Account settings

This is where you manage your credentials.

Admin

The most complete menu within settings:

• Setup
• General
• Updates
• Email
• Slack
• Authentication
• Maps
• Formatting
• Public sharing
• Embedding in other applications
• Caching

Setup

This part is only about helping you getting started with Metabase.

General

Site Name
Site URL
Email Address for Help Requests
Report Timezone
Language
Anonymous tracking
Friendly Table and Field Names

By default this feature is enabled. As a result Metabase may change the name of your tables to give them a name which is more explicit. To give you an idea a table named "matomo_access" will be converted into "Mat Omo Access". Note that you can come back to the state you want at anytime. This feature may be helpful if you don't know your database.

In this part you can disable the nested queries (it allows you to create questions based on questions) and disable X-ray feature in order to make less noise.

Updates

A simple feature to check automatically updates for you.

Email

This is where you are setting your email configuration. That's clearly where your system administrator will spent some time at the beginning to ensure that communications are sent securely. Or at least in the most secure way through emails.

Slack

This feature allows you to connect Metabase to Slack. This is used when you want to set alerts as pulse in Metabase, it is also useful to share it on Slack. Main issue is that Slack is not open source and hosting data within AWS, so do you really want your most useful data to be sent there. Though as Metabase is Open Source, integrations to competitors solutions allowing you to host your data anywhere may be possible.

Authentication

In some organization, managing credentials is a mess because there may be multiple services that users need a different access to. LDAP is a feature provided by Metabase which is well known by system administrators in order to speed up the authentication process. Metabase offers also a sign in process with Google... though it means that Google knows that you are using Metabase... a competitor solution to the one that Google has... Google Data Studio.

Maps

The map generator used in Metabase. It is used when there are geographical data to plot. By default it is using https://www.openstreetmap.org.

Formatting

It refers to the way you would like data to be shown in terms of format. In includes every format type from dates to currency so as figure separators.

Public sharing

It allows you to share publicly your data. Disabled by default. Interesting in some specific cases such as Open Data policy.

Embedding in other applications

This feature allows you to embed Metabase into other applications.

Caching

By default this feature is disabled. As you are playing with databases some of the requests made to them will make ages to load. By enabling caching you will speed up your instance as already loaded requests will not be loaded again.

Activity

It is also sometimes refereed as activity log in software. This part is about listing every activity which has been performed on your Metabase instance. This is typically a security feature. The idea is to know who did what and when. That's as well one of the report to investigate if something is going wrong. What was the last action performed before the computer freeze for example.

Help

A link to the online documentation of Metabase. This is really common on Open Source projects to directly redirect to online documentation At this time the Metabase community does not any offline documentation.

About Metabase

So as in many other software this is a standard feature telling you what version of the software you are using. This is really helpful when you start to debug your software. That's typically one of the information that people from forums will ask you when you will request some help.

Sign out

Self-explanatory, though useful for security reasons as far as you are at least securing your master password within your browser or somewhere else.

People

This part is about adding other users to the instance.

Data model

It introduces the different databases you have already inserted within Metabase.

Databases

It lists you the different databases that you can inject within Metabase.

Permissions

This is about who has access to what.

Troubleshooting

This is where all the issues will be listed.