Getting Started

Connect your dbt project and start querying metrics in under 5 minutes. No dbt Cloud subscription required.

Estimated time: 5 minutes

Prerequisites

  • A dbt project with semantic layer definitions (metrics and dimensions)
  • dbt Core 1.6+ or dbt Cloud (any tier)
  • Access to your data warehouse (BigQuery or DuckDB — more coming soon)
  • Service account credentials for warehouse access

Setup Steps

1

Create your Metricly account

Sign up for a free account at metricly.xyz/app. No credit card required.

After signing up, you will be prompted to create your first organization. Choose a name that represents your team or company.

2

Connect your data warehouse

Navigate to Settings > Data to configure your warehouse connection. Metricly currently supports:

  • Google BigQuery
  • DuckDB

Snowflake, Databricks, PostgreSQL, and Redshift coming soon.

Best practice
Create a dedicated service account with read-only access to the schemas your dbt project uses. This follows the principle of least privilege.

Example: BigQuery service account

# Required roles for the service account:
roles/bigquery.dataViewer
roles/bigquery.jobUser
3

Generate your semantic manifest

In your dbt project directory, run dbt parse to generate the semantic manifest file:

terminalbash
cd your-dbt-project

# Ensure you have dbt-metricflow installed
pip install dbt-metricflow

# Generate the manifest
dbt parse

# The manifest is at:
# target/semantic_manifest.json
dbt version requirement
The semantic layer requires dbt Core 1.6 or later. Run dbt --version to check your version.
4

Upload your manifest

Go to Settings > Data > Semantic Layer and upload your semantic_manifest.json file.

Metricly will parse your manifest and display the available metrics, dimensions, and entities. Review these to ensure your semantic layer was parsed correctly.

Automating manifest uploads
For CI/CD workflows, you can upload manifests via the API. See the dbt Integration guide for details.
5

Start querying your metrics

You are now ready to explore your data. Try these approaches:

Chat with your data

Open the chat panel and ask questions in natural language:

"Show me revenue by month for the last 6 months"

Build a dashboard

Click New Dashboard and describe what you want to see. The AI will generate widgets from your metrics.

You are all set!

Your dbt semantic layer is now connected to Metricly. Every metric and dimension you have defined in dbt is available for querying and visualization.

Next Steps

dbt Integration Deep Dive

Learn about MetricFlow, semantic models, and advanced configuration.

Read guide

Dashboard Building Guide

Explore widget types, controls, and JSON schema for custom dashboards.

Read guide