A global education platform embeds live student reporting with Metabase.

The Challenge: Before Metabase, Advantages School International relied on a homegrown reporting system that was slow, inflexible, and frequently inaccurate. Their proprietary Student Information System (SIS) and LMS data were siloed across hundreds of school instances, making cross-school reporting nearly impossible. For the product team, updating a single filter took hours, and inconsistent data was beginning to erode customer trust.

The Solution: Advantages School International chose Metabase as a real-time overlay on their AWS RDS database, replacing custom reporting tables. They used sandboxing to securely isolate data for thousands of users while providing a customer-friendly UI. This setup lets them deliver accurate, live student data without the latency of an intermediary sync.

The Results: Advantages School International moved from a three-hour report update cycle to just sixty seconds. By embedding Metabase dashboards directly into their platform, they now provide educators with real-time attendance and progress insights. While customers stay sandboxed in their own schools, the internal team uses global permissions to track sales and student trends across their full international portfolio.

"It used to take our team two or three hours to update a filter; now it takes a minute. We can see errors right away and pull real-time, accurate information directly from our database. "

Mariam Purcell
Product Manager at Advantages School International

Advantages School International is a global education platform that delivers online K-12 learning across multiple school organizations.

Why Metabase?

As an education technology company, Advantages School International needed to balance strict privacy requirements with a simple interface for school administrators. They evaluated heavier AWS-native tools, but those options felt too complex for their end users.

They chose Metabase for its:

• Direct RDS overlay. The ability to query their Amazon RDS instance directly, eliminating the “room for error” found in external reporting tables.
• Customer-friendly UI. An interface that fits the needs of non-technical school staff.
• Dynamic flexibility. The power to create filters that adapt automatically based on the scale of each school’s data.

The data

Advantages School International manages a complex ecosystem where grades, transcripts, and attendance flow in through deep API integrations.

• Multi-tenancy. Data is strictly siloed by school, while school groups (districts) can still get an aggregated view across up to 30 different school instances.
• Real-time accuracy. Most reports query live data, so teachers can see student progress as it happens.
• Hybrid querying. For specific API-heavy reporting paths, the team uses cached tables to keep the user experience fast.

How the Advantages School International team uses Metabase

The core of the implementation is Embedded Analytics. Advantages School International spent two months refining the setup for expert-level permissioning and sandboxing.

• Sandboxing. Every user is locked into their specific school instance, supporting strict privacy standards with data sandboxes.
• Embedded dashboards. Dashboards are integrated directly into the platform interface. To keep views clean, the team uses collapsible sections so users can expand or hide report groups.
• Double filtering. Top-level filters combined with nested aggregations help educators drill into class-specific metrics without creating many separate reports.
• Global admin access. Internal staff uses broader permissions to aggregate data across sales regions and school groups for a bird’s-eye company view.

The results

By moving away from “buying back” their own data through a custom-built reporting system, Advantages School International improved customer trust through speed and accuracy.

• Reduced engineering load. Updates that previously took hours now take about one minute.
• Better data quality. Because Metabase acts as a direct window into their RDS data, the team can spot and fix data upload errors immediately.
• Customer autonomy. Educators no longer wait for manual reports; they now have a single source of access for attendance and student performance.