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Metabase is an open-source business intelligence and analytics tool. Connecting Metabase to Paradime extracts your Metabase metadata so your dashboards and questions appear in the catalog and lineage next to the dbt™ models that feed them.

What you can do

Catalog & Lineage

Metabase dashboards and questions appear as assets in Paradime’s catalog and lineage, so you can trace dbt™ models through to the reports built on them.

Prerequisites

We recommend creating a new Metabase group and user to grant the correct access required to connect all your Metabase dashboards and questions to your dbt data models in Paradime.
You will probably need your Metabase administrator to follow the below steps - you may not have access yourself.

Step 1: Create a dedicated Metabase user for Paradime

Create a Metabase group

You can only attach Metabase permissions to groups, not individual users.
  1. From the upper right corner of your Metabase instance, click the gear icon and then Admin Settings.
  2. From the top menu bar, change to the People tab.
  3. From the left of the page, open the Groups tab.
  4. At the top right, click the Create a group button.
    • For Group name, enter Paradime.
    • On the right of the row, click the Add button.

Create a Metabase user

  1. From the upper right corner of your Metabase instance, click the gear icon and then Admin Settings.
  2. At the top of the page, change to the People tab.
  3. To the upper right of the table, click the Invite someone button and enter their details:
    • For First name, enter a first name for the new user, for example, Paradime.
    • For Last name, enter a last name for the new user, for example, Integration.
    • For Email, enter an email address for the new user, for example a service account email address.
  4. At the bottom of the dialog, click the Create button.
  5. When prompted, click Done.

Add user to the Paradime group

  1. From the People tab, click the Groups section on the left.
  2. Click the Paradime group you created.
  3. To the upper right of the table, click the Add members button.
  4. Under Members, start typing the name used above (for example, Paradime Integration) and select it.
  5. On the right of the row, click the Add button.

Set group permissions

Collection permissions

To set the minimum permissions required for Paradime to crawl your Metabase collections:
  1. From the upper right corner of your Metabase instance, click the gear icon and then Admin Settings.
  2. From the top menu bar, change to the Permissions tab.
  3. From the top of the page, change to the Collection permissions tab.
  4. For each collection you want Paradime to access:
    • Under the Collections heading on the left, click the collection.
    • Under Permissions for <collection name>, for the Paradime group, under Collection access, click the No access drop-down.
    • (Optional) To include sub-collections, toggle the Also change sub-collections option.
    • Select the View permission.
    • In the upper-right of the page, click the Save changes button.
  5. When prompted with Save permissions?, click the Yes button to confirm.

Step 2: Generate a Metabase API key

To generate an API key for the Paradime group:
  1. Log in to your Metabase instance as the Paradime user you created.
  2. From the upper right corner, click on your profile icon.
  3. Select Account settings.
  4. Navigate to the API keys section.
  5. Click Create API key.
  6. Give the key a descriptive name, for example, Paradime Integration.
  7. Copy the generated API key and store it securely - you’ll need this for the connection setup below.
API keys inherit the permissions of the user that created them. Since the Paradime user is part of the Paradime group with Administrator access, the API key will have the necessary permissions to extract lineage.

Catalog & Lineage

Bring Metabase assets into Paradime’s data catalog and column-level lineage, so you can trace dbt™ models through to the dashboards and questions built on them. The Metabase integration is set up by the Admin user for your organization profile. In Paradime, go to Settings → Integrations (see connecting integrations), find Metabase, and click Connect.

Step 3: Connection parameters

Click Test Connection to validate that Paradime can connect to your Metabase account, then click Save to complete the integration.
Connecting Metabase in Paradime