77 Open Source, Free and Top Dashboard Software: Review of 77 Open Source, Free and Top Dashboard Software including Top Dashboard Software Open Source: Seal Report, ReportServer Community Edition, Metabase, Shiny are some of the Dashboard Software Open Source.Top Dashboard Software Free: Google Data Studio, Cyfe, QlikView Personal Edition, Databox, Cluvio, Kyubit Business Intelligence. An example of using a public link to share a dashboard, with the Powered by Metabase footer. Permissions and auditing. Metabase handles permissions using groups, allowing you to control access to individual databases and tables, or to the collections containing your charts and dashboards. E.g., Granting the Accounting group access to the Orders. I am new to Metabase. And I have Metabase dashboards that I want to let team members be able to see. The Metabase is running on a remote server, and I want the team members to access it from there.

1. Metabase Public Dashboard Template

v0.39.0.1 / Users Guide / Interactive Dashboards

Interactive dashboards

1. After lots of consideration I decided it made more sense just to add:publicuuid and:madepublicbyid columns to Card and Dashboard rather than making entirely new DB models to track this information since the relationship is 1:1 and would require lots of joins and other wonkery since in many cases we'd want the UUID to be available without hitting separate endpoints.
2. Sharing and embedding dashboards or questions Sometimes you’ll want to share a dashboard or question you’ve saved with someone that isn’t a part of your organization or company, or someone who doesn’t need access to your full Metabase instance. Metabase lets administrators create public links and simple embeds to let you do just that.

You can customize what happens when people click on questions in your dashboard.

By default, when you create charts using Metabase’s graphical query builder, your charts automatically come with drill-through capabilities, which let folks click on a chart to explore further. But if you have a more customized click path in mind, Metabase allows you to customize what happens when a user clicks on a chart or table in your dashboard.

You can set up a dashboard card to:

• Send the user to a custom destination: a dashboard, question, or custom URL.
• Update a dashboard filter.

To configure this interactivity, you’ll use the click behavior option on a dashboard card.

Customizing click behavior

From your dashboard, click on the pencil icon to enter dashboard edit mode. Hover over the card containing the question you want to customize. Metabase will display a menu at the top right of the card. Select the Click behavior option (the icon with the mouse cursor clicking on a card).

Metabase will slide out the Click behavior sidebar:

For questions composed using the query builder, you can select from three options:

• Open the Metabase action menu.
• Go to a custom destination.
• Update a dashboard filter (if the dashboard has a filter).

SQL questions will only have the option to Go to a custom destination, and Update a dashboard filter, as the action menu is only available to questions composed with the query builder.

If your dashboard has a filter, you’ll also see an option to update the filter.

Open the action menu

For questions composed using the query builder, the default click behavior is to open the action menu, which presents people with the option to drill through the data:

Custom destinations

You can set custom destinations for all questions, including SQL questions.

Possible destinations include:

• Dashboards
• Saved questions
• URLs

Passing values to the destination

If you’re linking to a dashboard or a SQL question that has filters, you can pass values from the current dashboard to filters in the destination.

For example, if you link to a dashboard that has a filter for Category, you can pass a value for Category from the origin question to the destination dashboard:

Once you select the column that contains the value you want to pass, the sidebar will display the column used to pass the value, as well as the target filter at the destination that Metabase will pass the value to:

In the example above, when a user clicks on the Orders by product category card, Metabase will pass the clicked Product -> Category to the destination dashboard (“Interactive Dashboard”), which will then filter its cards by that Category.

You can also send the currently selected value of a dashboard filter on the current dashboard to the destination. And if you’re using Metabase Enterprise Edition, you can pass a user attribute provided by SSO to the destination, too. Those user attributes will show up as options when you click on one of the destination’s filters (provided the values are compatible with that filter).

When displaying questions as tables, you can select different click behaviors for different columns in the table. You can also modify the contents of the cells in a given column, replacing the value with custom text. For example, if you had a column that listed categories, you could change the text in the cell to read: “Click for details about {{Category}}”, where Category is the name of your column.

You can also use values to construct URLs to external resources.

From the Click behavior sidebar, select Go to a custom destination and link to URL. The Enter a URL to link to modal will pop up, allowing you to specify a URL, as well as a column or dashboard filter.

What we need to do here is to type in the full URL of where a user should go when they click on a value in a card. But the really powerful thing we can do is to include variables in the URL. These variables will insert the value that the user clicks on into the URL.

For example, we could type a URL like this:

The important part is the {{Category}} bit. What we’re doing here is referring to the Category that the user clicked on. So if a user clicks on the Widget bar in our chart, the value of the Category column for that bar (Widget) would be inserted into our URL: https://www.metabase.com/search.html?query=Widget. Your URL can use as many column variables as you want - you can even refer to the same column multiple times in different parts of the URL. Click on the dropdown menu Values you can reference to see your options for which variables you can include in the URL.

Next we’ll click Done, then Save our dashboard. Now when we click our chart, we’ll be taken to the URL that we entered above, with the value of the clicked bar inserted into the URL.

To learn more, check out Custom destinations: choose what happens when people click on charts in your dashboard.

Use a chart to filter a dashboard

If your dashboard contains at least one filter, you can set things up so that clicking on a chart in the dashboard will update a filter.

When a user clicks on, say, a bar in a bar chart, you could send the value of the clicked bar to the filter, and update cards across the dashboard. We call this functionality cross-filtering. You can use this cross-filtering to make a chart behave as kind of “navigation question” that filters data across other cards.

For example, clicking on the Widget bar will update the current dashboard’s category filter to filter for Widget:

To set up cross-filtering, choose a dashboard filter that you’d like to update on click, and a question to use to update that filter. You can think of this question as your “navigation question.” Instead of wiring this navigation question up to the filter, you’ll wire up every other question on the dashboard to the filter.

Below, we’ll use the Orders by product category question as our navigation question, so we’ll leave this question disconnected from the filter, and connect all the other questions to the Category filter.

With your filter wired up, stay in dashboard edit mode, and hover over the question you want to use as your navigation question to filter the dashboard. Click on the click behavior icon, then select the Update a dashboard filter.

Metabase will list the filters you can update. Here we select the Category filter, and supply the value to that filter from the question’s Product -> Category column.

Click Done in the sidebar, then Save your dashboard.

Now we can use our navigation question (Orders by product category) to interactively filter the data across your dashboard. When people click on a value in the navigation question, Metabase will send the clicked value to the filter, and update every card on the dashboard by filtering them for the clicked value - every card except for the navigation question: Orders by product category. The reason we don’t want the navigation question to update is so that we can click on other bars to update the filter with a different value.

To learn more, check out Cross-filtering: using a chart to update a dashboard filter.

Next: Charts with multiple series

We’ll learn how to create charts with multiple lines, bars, and more.

v0.39.0.1 / Users Guide / 07 Dashboards

Dashboards

What is a dashboard?

Dashboards group questions and present them on a single page. You can think of dashboards as shareable reports that feature a set of related questions.

A dashboard comprises a set of cards arranged on a grid. These cards can be questions - such as tables, charts, or maps - or cards can be text boxes.

You can add filter widgets to dashboards that filter data across multiple questions, and customize what happens when people click on a chart or a table.

You can make as many dashboards as you want. Go nuts.

How to create a dashboard

In the top right of the screen, click the + icon to open the Create menu, and select New Dashboard. Give your new dashboard a name and a description, choose which collection the dashboard should go in, then click Create, and Metabase will take you to your shiny new dashboard.

If you don’t want to build a dashboard from scratch, or want to experiment by making changes to an existing dashboard without affecting the original, you can duplicate an existing dashboard. From an existing dashboard, click on the … menu in the upper right, and select Duplicate.

Adding saved questions to a dashboard

There are two ways to add questions to a dashboard: from the dashboard, or from the question you want to add.

From a question: you can add a newly saved question to a dashboard directly from the window that pops up after you save the question for the first time. You can also add a question to a dashboard by clicking on the pencil icon next to the name of the question, and selecting Add to dashboard.

From a dashboard: Click on the pencil icon to edit the dashboard. Then click the + icon in the top right of the dashboard editing interface (not the + in the main navigation bar) to add any of your saved questions to the dashboard, regardless of which collection the questions are in.

Once you add a question to your dashboard, it’ll look something like this:

Adding headings or descriptions with text cards

Another neat thing you can do is add text cards to your dashboards. Text cards allow you to include descriptions, explanations, notes, or even images and GIFs to your dashboards. You can also use text cards to create separations between sections of charts in your dashboards, or include links to other dashboards, questions, or websites.

To add a new text card, create a new dashboard (or edit an existing one) and click on the text card button, Aa, in the top-right:

Your new, empty text card will appear. It has two modes: writing and previewing. Toggle between the modes by clicking the eye to preview the card, or the document with pencil icon to edit the card.

You can use Markdown to format the text in your text card, create inline tables or code snippets, or even embed linked images (easy on the GIFs, friends).

Click the eye icon to see what your formatted Markdown will look like when you save the card:

To learn more, see Fun with Markdown in your dashboards.

Arranging cards

Each question on a dashboard is in its own card that you can move around or resize as you see fit. Just click the pencil icon in the top right of a dashboard to enter the dashboard’s editing interface.

Once you’re in edit mode, you’ll see a grid appear. You can move and resize the cards in the dashboard to your liking and they’ll snap to the grid.

• To move a card, just click and drag the card.
• To resize a card, click the handle at the bottom right corner of the card, and drag to resize.
• To remove a card, hover over the card, and click the X icon in the top right corner.

Metabase will automatically update a question’s display to make sure your data looks great at any size you choose.

Changing a question’s visualization settings

You can change a question’s visualization settings on a dashboard (to add a goal line, for example,) without affecting the original question. Click on the pencil icon to enter dashboard edit mode, hover over the question you want to edit, and click on the palette icon to edit the question’s visualization’s settings.

.

Finding dashboards

You can search for any dashboard (or question, collection, or pulse) by its title in the big search box at the top of Metabase.

After a while, your team might accumulate a lot of dashboards. To make it easier to find dashboards that your team looks at often, you can pin them to the top of a collection. From the collection screen, click and drag a dashboard to the top, or click on the … menu and select Pin this item.

Fullscreen dashboards

After you’ve made your ideal dashboard, you may want to put the dashboard on a TV to help keep your team up to date throughout the day.

To enter fullscreen mode, click the fullscreen icon in the top right of the dashboard (the icon with the arrows pointing in opposite directions).

Once you’ve entered fullscreen mode, you can also switch the dashboard into “Night mode” for higher contrast.

Auto refresh

If your data updates frequently, you can set up your dashboard to refresh automatically by clicking on the clock icon.

You can set your dashboard to update in 1, 5, 10, 15, 30, and 60 minute intervals, depending on how fresh you need the data to be.

Enabling auto refresh will re-run all the queries on the dashboard at the interval you choose, so keep the size of the dashboard and the complexity of the questions in mind when setting up auto refresh.

Combining fullscreen mode and auto refresh is a great way to keep your team in sync with your data throughout the day.

Sharing dashboards with public links

If your Metabase administrator has enabled public sharing on a saved question or dashboard, you can go to that question or dashboard and click on the sharing icon to find its public links.

Public links can be viewed by anyone, even if they don’t have access to Metabase. You can also use the public embedding code to embed your question or dashboard in a simple web page or blog post. Check out examples of simple apps with embedded dashboards in our embedding-reference-apps repository. To learn more about embedding, check out our article on How to use Metabase to deliver analytics to your customers, as well as an article on how to combine branding, Single Sign-On, full app embedding, and data sandboxing to deliver multi-tenant, self-service analytics.

Configuring a dashboard through its URL

You can amend the URL of a dashboard to automatically enter fullscreen, enable night mode, or auto-refresh the dashboard. Customizing the dashboard’s URL allows you to configure the dashboard - even when you do not have any input access to the device where the dashboard will be displayed, like scripted screens, for example.

To configure a dashboard using its URL, you can add the following optional keywords: fullscreen, night, or refresh. Here’s an example:

https://metabase.mydomain.com/dash/2#refresh=60&fullscreen&night

The part that says refresh=60 sets the dashboard to automatically refresh every 60 seconds, fullscreen sets it to fullscreen mode, and night sets it to night mode (night mode only works when using fullscreen). Use an ampersand, &, in between keywords, and make sure there’s a hash, #, after the dashboard’s ID number.

There is one important limitation with the fullscreen option: for security reasons, many browsers require user interaction to initiate fullscreen. In those browsers, using the fullscreen option will enable the fullscreen UI in Metabase, but it won’t expand the browser content to fill the screen. To ensure the dashboard occupies the entire screen, either activate fullscreen by clicking the button in the UI, or use the fullscreen URL option and launch the browser in fullscreen or kiosk mode.

Archiving a dashboard

Archiving a dashboard removes the dashboard from searches and collections. Archiving a dashboard does not archive the individual saved questions on it — it just archives the dashboard.

To archive a dashboard, click the pencil icon to enter edit mode, then click the … menu, and select Archive.

To view all archived items, click the menu icon in the top-right of any collection page. You can unarchive a dashboard by clicking the icon of the box with the upward arrow next to that dashboard.

Tips on creating helpful dashboards

To make a great dashboard, you first need to decide what you want the dashboard to tell about your data. What questions will give you insight into what you want to know? It helps to think of a topic or theme for your dashboard — something like “customer satisfaction,” or “second quarter sales goals”.

Some tips:

• Emphasize the most important questions. To draw people’s attention to what matters most, place the most important saved question cards near the top of the dashboard, and/or make them bigger than the other cards,
• Keep dashboards focused. If you have more than 10 cards on a dashboard, think about breaking the dashboard into two separate ones. You don’t want to overwhelm people with too much information, and each dashboard should revolve around one theme or topic. Remember — you can make as many dashboards as you want, so you don’t have to cram everything into just one.
• Add filters to your dashboard. Adding filters to dashboards makes them more useful. For example, instead of your dashboard being full of questions that are restricted to a specific time span, you can make more general questions and use dashboard filters to change the time span you’re looking at.
• Make your dashboards interactive.Customize what happens when users click on a chart or table in your dashboard.

See Making dashboards faster for tips on improving dashboard performance.

Next: Adding dashboard filters

Metabase Public Dashboard Template

Make your dashboards more flexible and powerful by adding dashboard filters.