Revamped auditing tools: Metabase analytics collection

The new Metabase analytics collection is only available for the Enterprise Edition. Including a summary here just as an FYI.

• Get a comprehensive audit log of what’s been going on in your Metabase, with investigative tools to take action when you need to. The expanded set of internal data points includes configuration data: no more mornings lost asking around to find out who turned off SSO, when, and why. You can trace it back in your usage analytics and see who you need to follow up with.
• Set up alerts on auditing questions
• See exactly who’s using Metabase, when they’re using it, how often they’re using it, what people are looking at most, and more.
• Make the most valuable dashboards, questions, and models more accessible (on the Metabase home page, in official collections, or with subscriptions) so your data team isn’t tied up with ad hoc requests.
• Check your usage analytics for the slowest questions and dashboards, and see where you can speed things up by caching results, or retire something that’s not in use anyway.
• Better overviews for deactivating users, seeing where entity dependencies exist, and managing data migrations.
• Initially available only to Admins, you can grant permissions to view the Metabase analytics collection to other groups.
• Customize reports based on a set of models in the Metabase analytics collection.

Other improvements

• Auto-connecting dashboard filters. Connect one card to a filter, and Metabase will connect all other dashboard cards to that filter on the same field (if the field is present).
• Move cards between dashboard tabs.
• Filter search results by collection type, person who edited, and more. Find stuff that’s been recently created or touched so you know it’s trustworthy.
• Add and remove columns in bulk in table settings.
• Auto-assign Primary Key to CSV uploads.
• If you have basic actions enabled on the model, update and delete items directly via their object detail.
• X-ray indexed records in a table or model.
• New admin setting for SameSite session cookies for authenticating embedding users across domains.

Breaking changes and other notes

Metabase analytics

• With the launch of new Metabase analytics, we’ll no longer write activity and view logs to Metabase Starter and Open Source; these logs will only be available on Metabase Pro and Enterprise.
• Query execution tables will be truncated for queries over two years old.

API changes

We’ve renamed a couple of Dashboard entities:
- ordered_tabs key is now tabs.
- ordered_cards key is now dashcards.

Pulses will be removed from Metabase 49

Pulses gave way to dashboard subscriptions way back in Metabase 38. They’ve been chilling out in the background since then. We’ll remove them in the next major release (49).

Audit v1 will be removed in a future release

For the Enterprise Edition only: We’ll remove the previous audit logs in the Admin settings in a later release, as the new Metabase analytics collection replaces them. For now, you can still view and edit subscriptions and alerts in the Audit admin section, and we’ll let you know when and where we move these tools.

Changes to database user roles

We’ve made some performance optimizations to our database driver code and will no longer enforce read-only connections as much as before (although, it was never a given). You may not be affected, but we recommend checking out our guidance on managing database user roles and privileges in Metabase.

Upgrading

You can download a .jar of the release, or get the latest on Docker. Make sure to back up your Metabase
database before you upgrade! Need help? Check out our upgrading instructions.

Docker image: metabase/metabase:v0.48.0-RC1
Download the JAR here: https://downloads.metabase.com/v0.48.0-RC1/metabase.jar

Notes

SHA-256 checksum for the v0.48.0-RC1 JAR:

11c1981293a72627ef29ce516c56d4b146b5a392b820cbc22cc48a45e0915770

Changelog