An example of using a public link to share a dashboard, with the Powered by Metabase footer. These public links will include a Powered by Metabase footer, which you can remove with Enterprise embedding. The charts will also have their action menus disabled,. GET /api/dashboard/public. Fetch a list of Dashboards with public UUIDs. These dashboards are publicly-accessible if public sharing is enabled. You must be a superuser to do this. POST /api/dashboard/ Create a new Dashboard. PARAMS: name value must be a non-blank string. Description value may be nil, or if non-nil, value must be a string.
Whenever you’ve arrived at an answer that you want to save for later, click the SAVE button in the top right of the screen. This will also save the visualization option you’ve chosen for your answer.
A pop-up box will appear, prompting you to give your question a name and description, and to pick which collection to save it in. Note that your administrator might have set things up so that you’re only allowed to save questions in certain collections, but you can always save things in your Personal Collection. After saving your question, you’ll be asked if you want to add it to a new or existing dashboard.
Now, whenever you want to refer to your question again you can find it by searching for it in the search bar at the top of Metabase, or by navigating to the collection where you saved it. To edit your question, go to it and click the pencil icon in the top-right.
If your Metabase administrator has enabled public sharing on a saved question or dashboard, you can go to that question or dashboard and click on the sharing icon to find its public links. Public links can be viewed by anyone, even if they don’t have access to Metabase. You can also use the public embedding code to embed your question or dashboard in a simple web page or blog post.
After your team has been using Metabase for a while, you’ll probably end up with lots of saved questions. Metabase has several ways to help you organize things and find what you’re looking for.
Collections are the main way to organize questions, as well as dashboards and pulses. Administrators can give you different kinds of access to each collection:
In addition to the collections you and your teammates have made, you’ll also always have your own personal collection that only you and administrators can see. To find it, click on the “browse all items” button on the homepage and click on “my personal collection” in the list of collections.
You can use your personal collection as a scratch space to put experiments and explorations that you don’t think would be particularly interesting to the rest of your team, or as a work-in-progress space where you can work on things and then move them to a shared place once they’re ready.
In each collection, you can pin important or useful dashboards or questions to make them stick to the top of the screen. Pinned items will also be displayed as large cards to make them stand out well. If you have Curate permissions for a collection, you can pin and un-pin things, and drag and drop pins to change their order.
Any dashboards that are pinned in the main “Our analytics” collection will also show up on the homepage.
Use the search bar to find dashboards, questions, collections, and pulses. You can select from the typeahead’s dropdown results, or hit enter to view a search results page. You can also activate the search bar from anywhere by pressing the /
key.
Searches take into account items’ titles, descriptions, and other metadata — you can even search the contents of your SQL queries. For example, you can search for things like SELECT escape_pod FROM mothership
and find that one question you worked on six months ago. The results will display an item’s description, which collection it’s saved in, what kind of object it is, and whether it’s pinned. Note that you’ll only ever see items in collections you have permission to view.
To move a question, dashboard, or pulse into a collection, or from one collection to another, just click and drag it onto the collection where you want it to go. You can also click on the …
menu to the right of the question and pick the Move action. If you’re trying to move several things at once, click on the items’ icons to select them, then click the Move action that pops up at the bottom of the screen.
Note that you have to have Curate permission for the collection that you’re moving a question into and the collection you’re moving the question out of.
Sometimes questions outlive their usefulness and need to be sent to Question Heaven. To archive a question or dashboard, just click on the …
menu that appears on the far right when you hover over a question and pick the Archive action. You’ll only see that option if you have “curate” permission for the current collection. You can also archive multiple items at once, the same way as you move multiple items. Note that archiving a question removes it from all dashboards or Pulses where it appears, so be careful!
You can also archive collections if you have curate permissions for the collection you’re trying to archive, the collection it’s inside of, as well as any and all collections inside of it. Archiving a collection archives all of its contents as well.
If you have second thoughts and want to bring an archived item back, you can see all your archived questions from the archive; click the menu icon in the top-right of any collection page to get to the archive. To unarchive a question, hover over it and click the unarchive icon that appears on the far right.
Next, we’ll learn about creating dashboards and adding questions to them.
We know many of you were disappointed by the announcement that Chartio will be going away, and are looking for a new home for your charts and dashboards. So we wanted to provide this brief overview to help you decide if Metabase would be a good replacement for you. The fastest way to get to know Metabase is to download it and try it out, or to start a free Metabase Cloud trial. You can quickly and easily connect to your own data, or just play around the with Sample Dataset included with Metabase.
Metabase might be the right fit for you if you’re looking for:
Metabase is free and open source. You can host it yourself, or let us handle it on Metabase Cloud. We also have paid tiers with additional features for folks looking either to embed Metabase, or who are looking to manage complex permissions or large numbers of users.
You can also check out our homepage for an overview of our features, or take a Tour of Metabase to get some additional detail.
Amazon Redshift, PostgreSQL, Big Query, Snowflake, MySQL, Mongo, and more: Metabase has a bunch of officially supported databases, as well as a dozen community drivers.
Metabase scales well: check out our articles on Metabase at scale, and making dashboards faster.
Metabase makes it simple to connect to your data and start asking questions right away. Here are some details on querying, visualizing, and making dashboards.
There are two ways to put together a query in Metabase to create a chart. You can use:
Once you have the results you’re looking for, you’ll have more than 15 different visualizations to choose from, including pivot tables, gauges, time series with trend lines, maps, and numbers with percent changes. Check out our visualizations guide for more details.
A dashboard is way more than a collection of charts in Metabase.
We’ve already mentioned dashboard subscriptions, but here are some other ways to share what you make in Metabase with others.
Sharing a question or dashboard is as simple as sending someone a link (check out our Guide to sharing data). Or, you can always export your results to a CSV, XLSX, or JSON file.
Beyond dashboard subscriptions, you can also set up alerts on questions to send updates when a condition is triggered, like when a metric crosses a threshold.
You can embed single charts or entire dashboards in your app. The free open source edition will include a “Powered by Metabase” logo at the bottom of your embeds, while the Enterprise tier removes that attribution and allows you to embed the full Metabase application in your app, letting your customers explore the data on their own. Check out our guide on embedding Metabase in your app to deliver multi-tenant, self-service analytics.
Metabase handles permissions using groups, allowing you to control access to individual databases and tables, or to the collections containing your charts and dashboards.
If you need even more granular control over permissions, the Enterprise Edition includes data sandboxes that allow you to customize access to specific rows and columns in your tables. You can take a look at How to scale self-service analytics for an overview.
Lastly, in the Enterprise Edition, the Auditing tool lets you to track queries, downloads, dashboard views, and more, letting you answer the question “who saw what when?”
Metabase Cloud and Enterprise customers enjoy support directly from the Metabase team.
We’ve got you covered here. Metabase is easy to pick up and run with, but it has a lot of depth. We have reference materials in our documentation, and walkthroughs and guides on Learn Metabase.
If our docs don’t cover it, check out our discussion forum, which is a treasure trove of tips and problems solved. We even have a few core members of the Metabase team hanging out in there to help the community.
Check out Chartio’s migration guide to learn how to export your data. As for getting those questions into Metabase, you have a couple of options. You can rebuild your queries individually in Metabase using the graphical query builder, or copy and paste them into the SQL editor. That might take a while, though, so if you’re so inclined you can also use the Metabase API to programmatically create queries in Metabase by importing your exported SQL queries. If you want to prioritize things, you can check out your usage stats in Chartio to find your most-used queries, and migrate those first.
If you’ve made it this far, it’s probably time to spin up your own Metabase and kick the tires. But if you still have questions, feel free to start a chat with us or use our contact form.