Metabase Integration

This document walks through the steps required to create a service account in your Metabase, which will be connected to your Stemma Instance for dashboard metadata extraction.

Stemma uses the Metabase APIs to extract the metadata of Collections, Dashboards, Cards and Queries, and data sources associated with them. The Stemma integration is purely read-only and doesn’t modify any assets in Metabase.

Read Metabase’s docs: https://www.metabase.com/docs/latest/api-documentation

Stemma uses a service account in order to make a secure connection between your Stemma and Metabase instances. Below you can find out the steps required to create the new service account for this integration.

What is extracted?

Stemma extracts information about Collections, Dashboards, Cards, Queries, and data sources associated with them.

Stemma will not extract Dashboards that are archived, hidden or in a user’s personal collection.

Steps

Step 1: Make sure you have a Metabase Admin role

The Metabase → Stemma integration requires an Admin role to fetch the correct data and build the relationships between the entities like Table Lineage, Dashboard Owners, etc.

So, as a first step, make sure you have an Admin role.

Step 2: Create a Service Account

The next step is to create a service account. Go to you Admin console in Metabase then navigate to People → Groups. Click Create a group and call the group “Service Accounts”.

Go to the People tab and click Invite someone. Name the new user Stemma Service Account, provide an email and add the user to the Service Accounts group. If you want the Stemma Service Account to have access to all the metadata, add the user to the Administrators group as well.

If you wish to have a more fine-grained control over what the Stemma Service Account has access to, go to the Permissions tab and select Collections. Select each collection you’d like the Stemma Service Account to have access to and toggle Curate for the Service Accounts group. Click Save Changes in the top right.

Copy the password that is generated for the Metabase user, this will be used to connect to Stemma later.

Step 3: Retrieve your host

Your host is the URL for your Metabase instance. For example: https://stemma.metabase.com.

Step 4: Provide the details to Stemma

Navigate to the Admin tab of the Stemma UI and choose Connections and Add New Connection.

In the pop-up window, choose Metabase as the Connection type, provide a Connection Name, and then fill out the fields in the dialog box as follows:

• Base URL Example: https://stemma.metabase.com.
• Username The email of the service account email you created in Step 2.
• Password The one generated from Metabase in Step 2.

When you are finished, click Save Connection.