Metabase alerts

Metabase is a simple and powerful BI tool for business. We use it to get insights about almost everything that happens in our system. In recent version it added alerts feature to question, but has some limitations.

Firstly, the shortest time it allows checking for something bad may happen is one hour. It may seem acceptable in some business model but not ours. We need at most 5 minutes delay time in alerting.

Secondly, we can’t customize Slack alert format, and it sucks most of the time.

Lastly, I don’t know whether it’s a bug or not, but sometime the alerts just stop working!

Fortunately, Metabase has a rich API for frontend part, and we can use that to make our own alert system.

So our solution is use a Slack bot to call the question API periodically, and send a message to a choosen channel if the response is not empty.

Checkout the sample code here.