Classifieds Marketplace · Analytics · 2025

Self-hosted BI platform for a classifieds marketplace

A self-hosted analytics platform for a high-traffic classifieds marketplace — structured Metabase dashboards, full Prometheus observability, automated backup pipelines, and completely unattended SSL operations.

Self-hostedData sovereignty
5 minMetric resolution
WeeklyAutomated backups
ZeroManual SSL renewals

Context

Analytics without infrastructure

Product and operations teams at the marketplace tracked performance through ad-hoc SQL queries and manually assembled spreadsheets. As the platform scaled, the lack of a governed BI layer created reporting inconsistencies and slowed decision-making across teams.

Challenge

Data ownership, no operational automation

A cloud-hosted SaaS BI solution was ruled out — operational data had to remain on company-controlled infrastructure. Beyond that, there were no backup procedures, no monitoring of the BI platform itself, and SSL certificate management was entirely manual. Every operational task required direct administrator involvement.

Solution

Modular self-hosted analytics stack

We deployed a self-hosted analytics environment composed of independent, containerised subsystems — each separately manageable, fully observable, and recoverable without downtime.

Analytics layer

Metabase on dedicated infrastructure with PostgreSQL as application database and primary data source. Role-based access groups, structured dashboard organisation, and public sharing with revocable tokens for external stakeholders.

Observability stack

Prometheus with Alertmanager for infrastructure alerting. Custom cron-based exporters collect Metabase background job metrics directly from PostgreSQL and expose them via Node Exporter textfile collector — enabling 5-minute granularity monitoring.

Backup automation

Weekly automated database dumps with checksum verification and upload to S3-compatible object storage. Integrity checked on upload. Daily forced schema synchronisation via Metabase API keeps dashboards accurate without manual intervention.

Infrastructure & SSL

Nginx reverse proxy with Let's Encrypt certificates managed via Certbot. Initial issuance is a one-time manual step; renewal is fully automated through cron — zero operational overhead in production.

Engineering approach

How we delivered

Assessment

Audited existing data sources, reporting patterns, and infrastructure constraints. Defined data sovereignty requirements, access control model, and backup retention policy.

Architecture

Designed modular subsystem decomposition with separate Compose stacks for analytics, monitoring, and ingress. Defined backup schedules, alert routing, and schema sync cadence.

Implementation

Deployed Metabase and PostgreSQL, built custom Prometheus exporters, configured alert rules, and automated backup and schema sync pipelines end-to-end.