Metrics catalog

Browse and explore your metrics in the catalog, and map how they relate with Saved Trees

Getting Started

The Metrics page uses your existing Lightdash semantic layer and metrics definitions, so you can get started today. Head to Metrics in the navigation bar to start exploring.

The Metrics page has two views, switched with the toggle in the top-right corner:

• Catalog — A searchable, filterable table of all your project metrics. Browse metrics by category, owner, or popularity, explore any metric over time in the Metrics Explorer, and curate what your business users see through .yml configuration.

• Saved Trees — Shareable diagrams of how your metrics relate to each other. Build them on a canvas by connecting metrics with edges, or let drivers defined in your .yml draw the relationships automatically.

The spotlight config

spotlight is the YAML namespace that covers everything about how your metrics show up across the Metrics experience — visibility in the catalog (visibility), grouping (categories), ownership (owner), and explorer behavior like default time dimensions, filters, and segments. It works at two levels:

• Project level — defaults for the whole project, set in lightdash.config.yml (e.g. default_visibility, available categories)
• Metric/model level — per-metric overrides, set under meta.spotlight in your dbt model .yml (see curating the catalog)

Whenever you see spotlight in YAML, it’s configuring something on this page.

View catalog column configuration

The metrics catalog table has a Manage column visibility control (the eye icon). Open it to see which columns are shown and the order they appear in. The Metric column is pinned: it cannot be hidden or moved.

You can toggle the other columns or drag their handles to reorder them for your current view. Discard returns to the saved project configuration. Reading the project’s saved column configuration uses the View spotlight table configuration permission.

Save catalog column configuration

Users with Configure spotlight table settings permission can save the catalog’s column visibility and order for everyone in the project. Open Manage column visibility, adjust the columns, and select Save for everyone.

If there are unsaved changes, Discard restores the saved configuration. With no unsaved changes, Reset removes the project’s saved configuration and restores the default columns for everyone. These controls configure the catalog table’s columns; metric visibility, categories, and time defaults are configured separately through the spotlight YAML namespace.