Hi Metabase team,
We're a self-hosted Metabase OSS organization. We have a growing need for usage analytics (view logs, query logs, activity logs) to understand how our instance is being used — dashboard views, query performance, user activity, etc.
This need has become especially pressing with the enforcement of India's Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, which requires organizations to maintain audit trails and track how data is accessed across internal tools. Usage analytics isn't just a nice-to-have for us — it's becoming a compliance requirement.
We understand this functionality is part of the Enterprise/Pro edition. An enterprise/pro license isn't currently feasible for our organization.
Looking at the OSS codebase, we noticed that:
- The underlying database tables (view_log, audit_log, query_execution) and their SQL views (v_view_log, v_audit_log, v_query_log) already exist in the OSS schema — created by migrations that ship with the community edition.
- query_execution is populated in OSS, but view_log and audit_log writes are gated behind a premium feature check.
- The source code for the enterprise implementation is publicly visible.
This brings us to our questions:
- Is the Metabase Commercial License a feature restriction or a source code restriction? Specifically — if we write our own code (without modifying or patching any enterprise files) that populates the existing OSS tables using public APIs and event hooks, would that be permissible under the license? We want to be fully compliant and are asking before taking any action.
- Would the team consider making basic usage analytics available in OSS? Given the increasing regulatory requirements around data access auditing (DPDP in India, GDPR in EU, etc.), even a simplified version — just populating the existing tables — would be hugely valuable for self-hosted organizations that need compliance-grade visibility.
- Are we on the right channel for this question? If there's a better place to discuss licensing clarifications (legal team, a specific forum, support email), please do redirect us.
We use Metabase daily across our organization and it's been invaluable. We want to do the right thing here and are reaching out proactively rather than making assumptions about what the license permits.
Thank you.