Metabase

The BI layer of OrcheStack. Dashboards for stakeholders, SQL workbench for power users — all querying the marts schema directly.

Tier

Hot. Metabase stays running whenever it's enabled. Stakeholders need to open dashboards at any time — business hours, board meetings, ad-hoc exploration. Memory: ~1–1.5 GB.

Sign-in: Metabase runs its own session. The wizard captures the admin email + auto-generated password; from the dashboard, open Metabase's Details · pin · activity page → in the Connection card click Reveal to copy them. The first time you open Metabase after deploy, the orchestrator runs a bootstrap hook that calls Metabase's /api/setup with those credentials — if Metabase rejects the password (it has its own complexity rules), the hook auto-generates a strong replacement and writes it to METABASE_ADMIN_PASSWORD in .env; the Reveal flow always shows the current effective value.

Role

Metabase reads from the marts schema in PostgreSQL — the curated output of dbt. It does not read from raw (that's dbt's job) and it doesn't write anywhere.

Configuration

Note. Metabase maintains its own internal application database separate from your warehouse PostgreSQL. OrcheStack stores Metabase's internal state in PostgreSQL too, under the metabase_app schema, so your backups cover it.

Your first dashboard

Open Metabase from the dashboard. After the first-run wizard completes:

  1. Click Browse data → your warehouse → marts schema.
  2. Pick a table (e.g. fct_sales).
  3. Use the query builder or SQL editor to explore.
  4. Save the question, add it to a dashboard.