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New
#1437 Users can now share their dashboards with an automatically generated email
Changes
#1466 Filters now have clear language and indiciation that they use AND for chaining
#1464 Remove the “only” option for transforms in Create Pipeline form
#1399 Log Modal now has a prompt to explain potential factors in required time for pipelines to complete
#1431 Add “pipeline will still run if modal is closed” message in the Job Log Modal
Changes
#1422 Update start date field to have a recommendation
Fixes
#1447 Various fixes around loading and reloading reports to mitigate false positive sqlErrorMessage conditions
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Meltano v1.12.1 is now available, and makes a change to the Meltano UI that is aimed at simplifying the user experience when working with Meltano in the browser. The “Orchestrate”, “Model”, and “Notebook” tabs have been removed from the main navigation, and will be reconsidered when the features they represent provide value to Meltano users.
The three items removed offered limited functionality in the first place, and most users won’t even notice they’re gone. The “Orchestrate” and “Model” tabs offered customization options for something that was designed to work by default, and the “Notebook” tab was simply a link to documentation – all items we believe took away from the user experience and provided little to no value in exchange.
Removing major UI components is never taken lightly, and this decision stems from hundreds of conversations internally at GitLab, with current Meltano users, and with prospective Meltano users. We believe that removing these options simplifies the Meltano workflow, reduces confusion for first-time users, and cuts complexity in day-to-day operations when Meltano is deployed and shared across teams.
Changes in 1.12.1
#1403 Remove “Orchestrate”, “Model”, and “Notebook” from the main navigation until each respective UI is more useful (the /orchestrate and /model routes still exist)
#1476 Add database and warehouse revocations for roles in the meltano permissions command
#1473 Update Release issue template to recent guidelines
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#1436 Add video walkthrough on how to setup Google Analytics so that the Meltano Extractor can be able to access the Google APIs and the Google Analytics data.
Changes in 1.12.0
#1350 Switch to all lower case for Snowflake permission comparisons in the meltano permissions command
We like to build Meltano in public, and each week we recap the progress we’ve made and showcase new features, bug fixes, marketing work and other improvements on our YouTube channel.
The Meltano team will setup Meltano for any startup founder for free – all you have to do is tell us a little bit about your business.
We ask everyone who signs up for a Meltano account to answer a few quick questions, and we believe two of those questions are super important:
Which data sources would you like to connect to your dashboard?
Which business metrics would you like to include in your dashboard?
We’ve had an amazing response to our offer to host Meltano for anyone, and in doing so, have collected some really interesting data around the most popular requested connections and business metrics.
Popular Data Sources
By quickly graphing our responses, it’s clear that a majority of founders are using Google Analytics as a part of their marketing stack. This is followed closely by Facebook Ads and Google Ads, then Stripe, Salesforce, Zendesk, and Shopify.
Popular Business Metrics
We can also see that founders often care about how much they’re spending on ads, what it costs to acquire a customer, and how their sales pipeline is growing. Support response time and email list size are less important.
Interestingly, Google Analytics is the only clear common item across the majority of Meltano users. That result is expected, as Google Analytics is a free tool with a huge number of features.
Using These Responses to Improve Meltano
Everyone who signs up for Meltano has the opportunity to tell us about other data sources and business metrics they’re interested in tracking. While we won’t share those here, we will say that there are not only commonalities between the custom options, but clear direction around what founders are interested in tracking. We’ll continue to evaluate this data as we make product decisions, especially around new data sources to support and dashboarding features.
Get Started With Meltano
If you’re a founder and interested in tracking your Google Analytics, Salesforce, and advertising data in a single place for free, sign up for a Meltano account – you’ll get to answer the questions we discussed in this article, and a member of the Meltano team will work with you to setup your account at your convenience.
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#1401 Fix double instance of self hosted CTA on desktop sites
New in 1.11.0
#1361 Add kind: hidden to discovery.yml so certain connector settings can validate with a default value but remain hidden from the user for improved UX
Changes in 1.11.0
#1389 Temporary Profiles feature removal (conditionally removed if 2+ profiles not already created so existing users can continue using multiple profiles if created)
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Some users who upgraded to v1.8.0 may have experienced issues after installation – v1.9.0 and v1.9.1 fix these issues. If you’re having trouble with v1.8.0, please upgrade to v1.9.1. If problems persist, please feel free to reach out to us on our public Slack!
#1355 Upgrade version of discovery.yml so that not upgraded Meltano instances with a pre v1.9.0 Meltano version do not break.
New in v1.9.0
marketing#103 Add Google Site Verification token to site
#1346 Add new tutorial for using FileZilla with a Meltano project
#1292 Add guide for setting up Meltano projects on meltanodata.com
Changes v1.9.0
#1341 Various discovery.yml and connector configuration UI updates to improve UX.
#1341 Updated documentation to communicate the various optional settings of a connector
Fixes in v1.9.0
#1334 Fix automatic population of airflow.cfg after installation
#1344 Fix an ELT automatic discovery error when running Meltano on Python3.6
What’s Next
Every week, the Meltano team records their kickoff meeting on Monday morning. Each recorded meeting is available for anyone to watch. Watch this week’s video where we discuss the upcoming release and what’s on deck for the week! (Don’t worry, even though Danielle is participating from her car, she’s safely and legally parked in the winter wonderland that is Denver, Colorado.)
In November, we released Meltano as a free hosted product, eliminating the hosting and installation hassle with a concierge setup so you can start building dashboards faster.
Our goal is to grow Meltano MAUI (monthly active UI users) by 10% week-over-week, which is similar to the growth metric we are challenged to achieve while in Y Combinator. At the target pace (in red) we will have 1,000 MAUI by the end of 2019. While we experienced significant month-over-month growth of MAUI relative to October, we are still behind pace.
Thank you to all our contributors, both inside GitLab and across the broader open source community for Meltano. Get involved with the open source Meltano project by reading our Contributor Guide and joining the discussion in the public Meltano Slack community.
MRs Merged by Month
Top Contributors by Opened MR Count
Consolidated CHANGELOG
New
#1222 Include static application security testing (SAST) in the pipeline
#1164 Add “transform limitations” message to Transform UI
#1272 Add Vuepress plugin to generate a sitemap on website build
meltano-marketing#89 Adds basic title and meta descriptions to all public-facing website & documentation pages.
#1285 Add link to YouTube guidelines for release instructions
#1277 Move sections that don’t apply to outside contributors from Contributing and Roadmap docs to Handbook: Release Process, Release Schedule, Demo Day, Speedruns, DigitalOcean Marketplace
#1236 Add contextual Analyze CTAs in the Job Log UI
#764 Add plugin profiles to enable multiple configurations for extractors
#1253 Do not allow meltano command invocation without any argument
#1192 Improve helper notes associated with each Extract, Load, and Transform step to better communicate the purpose of each
#1201 Improved “Auto Advance” messaging regarding Entity Selection. We also doubled the default toast time to improve likelihood of reading feedback.
#1191 update Google Analytics extractor documentation to explain how to set up the Google Analytics API, and remove duplicate instructions from the Google Analytics API + Postgres tutorial
#1199 Add example and sample CSV files to the CSV extractor documentation
#1247 Update the Loading CSV Files to a Postgres Database Tutorial to use Meltano UI for setting up the Extractor and Loader, running the ELT pipeline and analyzing the results. Also provide all the files used in the tutorial (transformations, models, etc) as downloadable files.
#1279 Revise “Roadmap” section of the docs with clarified persona, mission, vision, and re-order content
#1134 Update the GitLab API + Postgres. Include video walk-through and update the end to end flow to only use Meltano UI.
#95 Update the DigitalOcean CTA to go to the public directory page for the Meltano droplet
#1270 Main navigation “Pipeline” to “Pipelines” to reinforce multiple vs. singular (conflicts a bit with the verb approach of the other navigation items but we think it’s worth it for now)
#1240 Provide clarity around how Airflow can be used directly in documentation and UI
#1263 Document lack of Windows support and suggest WSL, Docker
#1289 Dismiss all modals when using the escape key
#1282 Remove Entity Selection from the UI (still available in CLI) and default to “All” entities for a given data source
#1303 Update the configuration options for the Salesforce Extractor to only include relevant properties. Remove properties like the client_id that were not used for username/password authentication.
#1308 Update the configuration options for the Marketo Extractor to use a Start Date instead of a Start Time.
#1323 Add CTA to send users to Typeform to provide info for setting up a hosted dashboard
#1271 Improve messaging on tap and target settings modals
#1226 Update Pipelines main navigation link to show all data pipeline schedules if that step has been reached
#1323 Add CTA to send users to Typeform to provide info for setting up a hosted dashboard
#1271 Improve messaging on tap and target settings modals
#1246 Update the Salesforce API + Postgres Tutorial to use Meltano UI for setting up the Extractor and Loader, running the ELT pipeline and analyzing the results.
#1225 Update dbt docs link to be conditional so the user doesn’t experience 404s
Fixes
#1259 Fix meltano elt not properly logging errors happening in the ELT process
#1183 Fix a race condition causing the meltano.yml to be empty in some occurence
#1258 Fix format of custom extractor’s capabilities in meltano.yml
#1215 Fix YouTube iframes to be responsive (resolves unwanted side-effect of horizontal scrollbar at mobile/tablet media queries)
#1297 Get actual latest ELT job log by sorting matches by creation time with nanosecond resolution
#1297 Fix pipeline failure caused by jobs that require true concurrency being executed on CI runners that don’t
#1298 Let default entity selection be configured in discovery.yml under select
#1298 Define default entity selection for tap-salesforce
#1304 Fix Meltano subprocess fetching large catalogs (e.g. for Salesforce) getting stuck do to the subprocess’ stderr buffer filling and the process getting deadlocked.
#1184 Fix contextualModels implementation for contextual CTAs in Job Log modal
#1318 Pin dbt version to v0.14.4 to address Meltano Transformation failing when using dbt v0.15.0
As Meltano progresses in maturity, functionality and features and the team continues to grow we are publishing more MRs, updates, and videos than ever before. Starting this month, we will recap our progress here and through the Meltano newsletter.
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New in this release
#764 Add plugin profiles to enable multiple configurations for extractors
While Meltano will continue to offer self-hosted options for more technical users, it has become clear that there is still too much friction in getting started.
Self-hosting software requires technical know-how or the patience to walk through step-by-step instruction guides
Meltano needs to support more data sources to deliver insights that The Founder cares about: how much is it costing to acquire my customers? how are they using my product? are they happy?
Meltano needs to work out of the box, with far less configuration of databases and transforms
Meltano needs to be more opinionated about what dashboards and metrics to provide, based on the data that is connected
We look forward to working with you to set up the data connectors you care about, and help build the reports and dashboards that you’ll be excited to share with your investors and team members.
