Problem Statement
The client required a tool to query, visualize, and disseminate data company-wide. Their objective was to enable all employees to perform individual analytics, freeing up the data team to concentrate on more intricate projects. Additionally, they sought to replace the proprietary Inetsoft reporting solution with an open-source reporting platform.
Solution Overview
We integrated Metabase as the comprehensive reporting solution, onboarding various application databases and data warehouses onto the platform. Access to pertinent databases has been granted to the respective teams. The following are key highlights of the implementation:
- All the databases are onboarded to Metabase
- Snowflake, Redshift, MySQL, SQL Server are some of the database types onboarded to the reporting tool
- The authentication is via Active Directory integration
- Role based access is setup in Metabase for the user groups to their respective databases
- Separate roles are created for users who can create new charts and dashboards vs users who only have read-only access to view existing dashboards
- Helping teams to create technical and business reports and dashboards
- Scheduling reports to reach intended user list as desired frequency
- Analyzed the existing reports in Inetsoft and created those in Metabase
- Implemented cross database reporting capability in Metabase which allows one to create reports from different databases without creating a data warehouse
- Leveraged API capabilities of Metabase for application integration
Tech Stack leveraged
The deployment has below tech components:
- EC2 machine for running the Metabase application
- MySQL Aurora for hosting the DB of Metabase
- Presto is used as a data layer to access few specific types of databases
- AD integration for user authentication
- Snowflake, Redshift, MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server as source data of the different applications
Benefits Delivered
Metabase provided the client with true self-service analytics capabilities for their entire organization, spanning product, engineering, finance, sales, and success teams. This enables each team to efficiently explore and monitor data, fostering data-driven decision-making. Additionally, it resulted in cost savings by eliminating the need for Inetsoft licenses and consolidating ad hoc reporting and alerting tasks onto a unified platform. The capability to join different databases in a single query has eliminated the need of creating data warehouse for several reporting use cases.