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Activation required. AI access management must be enabled for your tenant before you can use it. To get started, contact the C1 support team for a walkthrough.
The Metabase MCP server lets you govern access to Metabase — dashboards, questions, collections, databases, and users — as tools your AI clients can call through C1. Metabase authenticates with an API key that C1 sends in a request header. A single key authenticates everyone, so all tool calls reach Metabase as one shared identity.

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How C1 connects to Metabase

C1 hosts the Metabase MCP server, so your users’ AI clients only ever see MCP tools — they never call Metabase directly. When an AI client calls one of these tools, C1 makes the matching request to the Metabase API using the credentials you configure here, then returns the result to the AI client. The credentials you set up below are what C1 uses to call Metabase on your users’ behalf.

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Before you begin

  • AI access management must be enabled for your tenant. See Enable AI access management.
  • A Metabase admin account that can create API keys. An API key inherits the permissions of the group you assign it to, so assign a group that has the access you want this integration to have.
If you don’t see Metabase in your MCP server catalog, contact the C1 support team to enable it for your tenant.

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Create a Metabase API key

Create an API key in Metabase and assign it to the group whose permissions it should carry. For more information, see Metabase’s API keys documentation.
1
Sign in to your Metabase instance as an admin and go to Settings > Admin settings > Authentication > API Keys.
2
Select Create API Key.
3
Give the key a recognizable name such as C1, then choose the group whose permissions the key should carry.
4
Create the key and copy it. Metabase shows the key only once.
For a shared production setup, assign the key to a dedicated group so activity is attributable to C1 rather than a person, and scope that group to only the data you want to govern.

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How Metabase credentials are shared

Every user’s tool calls use the one API key you provided, so Metabase sees a single shared identity. C1 still attributes each call to the individual user in the AI tool usage audit log. For a shared setup, assign the key to a dedicated group so activity is attributable to C1 rather than a person. For how shared and per-user credentials work across MCP servers, see Configure authentication.

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Register the Metabase MCP server in C1

With your API key ready, register the server and provide it to C1.
1
Follow Register an MCP server and select Metabase from the catalog.
2
When you configure authentication, choose Custom header. Set the header name to X-Api-Key and the value to your Metabase API key. Enter your Metabase instance URL when prompted.
3
Save your changes. C1 starts a sync that discovers the tools the Metabase server exposes.

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Discover and govern tools

After you register the server, C1 runs tool discovery against Metabase. Discovered tools appear on the server’s Tools tab. Each tool starts as either Pending review or automatically Approved, depending on the option chosen when the server was set up or your tenant’s default tool settings in Settings > AI Connections. See Require tool approval and Default tool classification. Before anyone can call a Metabase tool, it must be approved, added to a toolset, and bound to an access profile. Continue to Govern tools and toolsets to set this up.
Tool discovery runs even if your credentials are incorrect, so seeing discovered tools doesn’t confirm that authentication is working. You confirm your Metabase credentials when an approved user successfully calls a Metabase tool from their AI client.

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Manage your Metabase credentials

  • Rotate the API key by creating a new key under Admin settings > Authentication > API Keys, updating it in C1, then deleting the old key.
  • Adjust access by changing the group the key belongs to, or by editing that group’s permissions in Metabase.