With Metabase

Metabase is an open-source business intelligence tool where you can build graphs and dashboards of your data.

As Metabase puts it:

Business intelligence for everyone Team doesn’t speak SQL? No problem. Metabase is the easy, open-source way to help everyone in your company work with data like an analyst.

Setup

• Ensure you have the details of your Hydra instance handy.

• Sign up for Metabase.

Seed some sample data

Let’s start by creating a sample table in Hydra and populate it with some data. You'll need to replace your Hydra connection string or set the PGCONN environment variable.

• Create a sample table and seed some data.

  psql "$PGCONN" \
    -c "CREATE TABLE sample_data (id uuid NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY DEFAULT gen_random_uuid(), sample integer, timestamp timestamptz) USING columnar;" \
    -c "INSERT INTO sample_data (sample, timestamp) SELECT floor((random() + random() + random() + random() + random() + random()) / 6 * 100000000)::int, to_timestamp(EXTRACT(epoch from NOW()) - floor(random() * 2600000)) FROM generate_series(1, 50000);"

We’ve created a table named sample_data with 50,000 random samples spread out over the last month.

Metabase first launch

Now we can configure Metabase to access our sample data in the Hydra.

• Head over to Metabase and log in.

• Add your Hydra instance as outlined in the below screenshot.

Metabase, add your data

• Once you’ve landed at the Metabase dashboard you should see some options to view insights after a few seconds. Take some time to explore Metabase, for example “a glance at Data”

Metabase: Queries, Questions and Dashboards

Now let’s combine the features of Metabase and Hydra to explore our sample data.

Queries

You can use Metabase to run ad hoc queries against Hydra. You can access it via New → SQL query.

Howdy, Hydra

SELECT
    MIN(sample), MAX(sample), COUNT(sample), AVG(sample), STDDEV(sample)
FROM sample_data;

For example we can run some summary statistics against our sample data using:

example question

Questions

Metabase allows you to use questions to get answers from your data. Let’s create some questions now, that we’ll later turn into a dashboard. You can create questions via New → Question.

Let’s create four questions:

1. Number of samples over the last 7 days

   

   number of samples over the last 7 days settings

   

   number of samples over the last 7 days example
2. Average values of samples over the last 7 days

   

   average values over the last 7 days settings

   

   average values over the last 7 days example
3. Average value of samples per day over the last 30 days

   

   average values over the last 30 days settings

   

   average values over the last 30 days example
4. Distribution of Samples over the last 30 days

   

   distribution over the last 30 days settings

   

   distribution over the last 30 days example

Dashboards

Now let’s combine those questions into a dashboard to give our users at a glance access to these metrics.

1. Create a new dashboard via New → Dashboard

2. Add the four questions created above to the dashboard

dashboard setup

dashboard example

Cleanup

Once you’re done exploring Metabase and Hydra you can cleanup the sample data be droping the sample_data table.

psql "$PGCONN" -c "DROP TABLE sample_data;"