When I joined Reforge a year ago, I found that we were querying our databases manually to do routine analysis. If we wanted to update the team on the number of people who had applied or paid for our programs, we’d run a query against the database and then put the results in a spreadsheet. If we wanted a list of users from our programs by company, we’d run a query and put it in a spreadsheet. While this answered our questions at the time, I felt like we could do a lot better. After having used Looker in my time at HubSpot, I wanted a lightweight solution to help us enable the entire company to have access to critical data about the business and make data-informed decisions. We started using metabase.

Metabase has been a huge help for me in democratizing access to our data. Metabase connects directly to any databases you want, and it allows anyone in the company (I have chosen not to set up advanced permissions yet) to manually inspect data, do advanced reporting, or view dashboards.

This is an example of what it looks like when someone looks at our program applications table (simple database table that keeps track of applications to our growth programs):

Benefits:

• Team members can look at the table as if it were a spreadsheet
• They can apply filters as if it was a spreadsheet
• They can visualize the results more easily than in a spreadsheet

I routinely build reports in metabase that filter to people with a certain condition and send it to teammates. It’s so easy to report on people who work at company X that are in participating in one of our programs. Much better to generate a simple report and then share it with a colleague knowing that it should always be up to date, even if our underlying data is updated.

You can also easily switch between a table view, and many other ways to visualize the data (table, line chart, area chart, bar chart, row chart, scatter chart, pie chart, and a map):

Once you’ve filtered your data set and chosen how to visualize it, it’s easy to then add it to a dashboard of other reports. It’s really nice that you can combine data from multiple databases into the same dashboard, and drag and drop the charts in any configuration you want. This is a dashboard that I setup to monitor the performance of applications submitted to our recent cohort of programs, as well as how people were paying for their spot. It has a segmentation of which programs they’re applying to, how much revenue we’re generated, how we’re comparing to previous periods, and where people are submitting applications from:

There are a ton of other features that I am a huge fan of. Some of them:

• Posting questions to slack at a regular interval:

Or via email:

It has been a huge help for me personally, and this doesn’t even cover all of the ways in which we use it. Best of all, it’s free and open source. We pay to host it ourselves via Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.

This kind of solution comes in incredibly handy in our overall data pipeline, especially when we can point it to a copy of our production database and our analytics data warehouse that is populated by Segment.