Administration

Administration and operation

Guidance on running and administering Metabase at scale.

Admin overview

An overview and list of resources for Metabase admins.

4 min read

How Metabase works with your database

Metabase doesn't store your data. Learn how Metabase queries data in your database, uses metadata to make some magic happen, and gives you options to cache queries and persist models to speed things up.

5 min read

How to run Metabase in production

If you're self-hosting Metabase, here are some benchmarks and best practices.

10 min read

Managing people in Metabase

How to go from managing dozens of users to thousands.

6 min read

Guide to sharing data

Inside or outside your organization, what are your options for sharing your data or analysis, and when should you use one method over another?

6 min read

Keeping your analytics organized

How to keep your analytics organized as the numbers of users, questions, and dashboards inevitably increases.

8 min read

Multiple environments

Options for spinning up dev, staging, or test environments.

3 min read

Serialization: preloading dashboards in a new Metabase instance

How to use Metabase's serialization feature to copy questions, dashboards, collections, settings, and more from one Metabase instance to a new Metabase instance.

13 min read

Setting up a git-based workflow

Create models, questions, and dashboards in a staging Metabase, commit your changes to a repository, and push those changes to your production Metabase.

8 min read

Making dashboards faster

How to make your dashboards load faster.

9 min read

Metabase at scale

Best practices for scaling Metabase to support more people and databases.

11 min read

Working with the Metabase API

An introduction to Metabase's API.

15 min read

Permissions

Permissions, groups, data sandboxing, and auditing.

Permissions strategies

How to think about structuring groups and permissions in Metabase.

5 min read

Guide to data permissions

Learn about how Metabase handles data permissions by setting up permissions on the Sample Database included with Metabase.

8 min read

Working with collection permissions

Set up collections with permissions to help people organize and share the work that's relevant to them.

5 min read

Basic sandboxes: setting row-level permissions

Learn how to set row-level permissions based on people's user attributes.

4 min read

Custom sandboxes: limiting access to columns

Learn how to use a saved SQL query to display specific rows and columns to different people.

5 min read

Data sandboxes: personalizing the data that people can see in Metabase

Pair sandboxes with user attributes to customize data for almost any situation.

3 min read

Use Impersonation to get row-level permissions with both GUI and SQL queries

Create roles in your database, and have Metabase impersonate those roles when querying your database.

3 min read

Configuring multi-tenant data permissions

Learn how to restrict customer access to rows, columns, or schemas for secure self-serve analytics.

7 min read

How to keep tabs on your data

Set up alerts on usage analytics to get notified about when people change settings, download data, or make data public.

3 min read

Using LDAP for authentication and access control

Learn about using LDAP to authenticate people and manage their access to data.

3 min read