MonthSeptember 2022

Setting up a simple on-call schedule in Slack and Zapier

The Reforge data team doesn’t require anyone to “carry a pager” and be available during certain periods to respond to issues at any time of day or night. That said, we do have a rotating responsibility for responding to slack forums and looking at alerts from our data observability tool, Metaplane.

One of the issues is that we ask people to be available for a week at a time to be the point person on responding to questions or issues that come up. We don’t expect everyone to be the one to fix / respond to an issue, but we ask that they be the point person to help move it forward.

I built a really simple reminder workflow in Slack to remind people of what they should be doing when they are in this role because it’s easy to forget. I thought I’d share how easy it was to setup and see if anyone had any other tools / processes they use.

We already had a google doc that listed the dates that each person was responsible for, and I built a quick mapping table that takes a person’s name and puts in their Slack id. It’s easy to get someone’s slack id.

The google doc has a row for each day, lists the person responsible, and their slack ID

I then built a workflow in Zapier that:

  • Runs every day at a standard time (12pm ET)
  • It checks to make sure that it’s a weekday (not a weekend)
  • It looks up the row in the spreadsheet for the current day
  • It only continues if there’s a slack ID for that person that day (if someone doesn’t want the reminders they can delete their slack id from the row)
  • It sends them a direct message on slack from a reminder bot

This is the DM that people get in Slack:

How do others in the data space ensure that the team rotates through different responsibilities, get reminded of what they’re supposed to do, and ensure they’re aware of how to do it? I don’t want to go full-blown pager service and this felt like the right level of reminder for our stage of company (the team has 5 analysts, a manager, a data engineer, and myself).

Analyzing Metabase Usage

I am the head of data at Reforge (we’re hiring!) and data is critical to our success. We use it to track our business, individual teams leverage it in their work, and we believe in empowering people in the company with data to help them do great work. We use all sorts of great tools, but as the head of data I felt it was important to understand whether people were actually using our BI (business intelligence) tool.

I built a weekly report that lays out how my company is using our BI tool, Metabase. It has the following reports:

  • Dashboards created in the past 7 days
  • Questions created in the past 7 days
  • Individual Dashboard views by our exec team in the past 7 days
  • Dashboard view counts by user in the past 7 days
  • Activity by my boss (our CTO)
  • Metabase MAUs
  • Metabase WAUs

It helps me to understand at a high level what is happening inside the company from a data perspective:

  • Who is building reports (questions / dashboards)
  • What questions people are asking of our data
  • What is most important to our exec team
  • Who is looking at information on a regular basis
  • What is top of mind for my boss
  • How engaged our company is with our data & analytics

It was surprisingly easy to set this up. All we had to do was add the Metabase internal database as a source to Metabase (sounds confusing, but actually quite simple). It wouldn’t shock me if this became a paid feature long-term for Metabase on their enterprise plan, but it took less than 30 minutes to figure out their data model and build some quick and dirty SQL questions that produced answers to our most important questions. Metabase is already storing all of the data we needed to visualize to get answers to our questions.

I set this up as a dashboard subscription so it is delivered to my email every week and I can quickly scan it to understand what’s top of mind for the org.

Reforge is Data Driven

Since the beginning of the company we’ve looked at data to understand how well we’re tracking against key goals for the company (revenue, applications, content completion, weekly activity, etc). These stats span across the entire company in terms of usefulness (support, sales, marketing, product, engineering, design, finance, etc) and we strive to make as much information accessible to everyone so that they can be data informed.

If you’re considering joining a company – do you want to be at one that uses data to help inform decisions? You can see below that Reforge employees are using data on a regular basis and you can see how it scales as we’ve grown the team and hit key milestones. We’ve typically seen 75-100% of employees leveraging Metabase on a monthly basis.

Our Metabase monthly active users along with company milestones

The queries that we use to power the charts:

Dashboards created in the past week

select created_at, name, u.email, left(description, 40) as description, 'https://BI_HOSTNAME/dashboard/' || d.id as url
from report_dashboard d
    inner join core_user u 
        on d.creator_id = u.id
where created_at > current_date - interval '7 days'
order by 1 desc

Questions created in the past week

select created_at, name, u.email, 'https://BI_HOSTNAME/question/' || d.id as url
from report_card d
    inner join core_user u 
        on d.creator_id = u.id
where created_at > current_date - interval '7 days'
order by 1 desc

Exec team dashboard views in the past week

For this report, I wanted to know what the exec team was looking at in the past week. I want to know how much they’re looking at the metrics and whether they’re looking at the dashboards I think they should be looking at.

select u.email, d.name, count(v.id)
from view_log v
    inner join core_user u
        on v.user_id = u.id
    inner join report_dashboard d
        on v.model_id = d.id
where model = 'dashboard'
    and u.email in 
        (LIST_OF_EMAILS)
    and v.timestamp > (current_date - interval '7 days')
group by 1, 2
order by 3 desc
limit 200

Dashboard views leaderboard (views in the past week)

This shows the number of views by user in the past 7 days. It’s always a good sign when your head of data isn’t the most prolific viewer of dashboards.

List of users and their views
select u.email, count(v.id)
from view_log v
    inner join core_user u
        on v.user_id = u.id
    inner join report_dashboard d
        on v.model_id = d.id
where model = 'dashboard'
    and v.timestamp > (current_date - interval '7 days')
group by 1
order by 2 desc
limit 200

Most popular dashboards by views

select d.name, count(v.id)
from view_log v
    inner join core_user u
        on v.user_id = u.id
    inner join report_dashboard d
        on v.model_id = d.id
where model = 'dashboard'
    and v.timestamp > (current_date - interval '7 days')
group by 1
order by 2 desc
limit 200

Questions created by a single person

select created_at, name, u.email, 'https://BI_URL/question/' || d.id as url
from report_card d
    inner join core_user u 
        on d.creator_id = u.id
where created_at > current_date - interval '28 days'
    and u.email = EMAIL_OF_YOUR_BOSS
order by 1 desc

Metabase MAUs

select date_trunc('month', timestamp), count(distinct user_id) 
from view_log 
group by 1
order by 1

Metabase WAUs

select date_trunc('week', timestamp), count(distinct user_id) 
from view_log 
group by 1
order by 1

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