## The Two Paths To Connect Asana To Your Data Warehouse

There are two ways to sync data from Asana into your data warehouse for analytics.

### Method 1: Manually Developing A Custom Data Pipeline Yourself

Write code from scratch or use an open-source framework to build an integration between Asana and your warehouse.

### Method 2: Automating The ETL Process With A No-Code Solution

Leverage a prebuilt connector from a cloud-hosted solution like Portable.

![Two Paths To Connect Asana To Your Data Warehouse](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1FEgw5jLK-AKA6MQCzuwxv3kFSHuBJ6xl)

## How To Create Value With Asana Data

Teams connect Asana to their data warehouse to build dashboards and generate value for their business. Let’s dig into the capabilities Asana exposes via their API, outline insights you can build with the data, and summarize the most common analytics environments teams are using to process their Asana data.

### Extract: What Data Can You Extract From The Asana API?

Asana is a project management solution used for managing internal and external workflows.

To help clients power downstream analytics, Asana offers an application programming interface (API) for clients to extract data on business entities. Here are a few example entities you can extract from the API.

- Workspaces
- Projects
- Project Tasks
- Teams
- Users
- Etc.

You can visit [the Asana API documentation](https://developers.asana.com/docs) to explore the entire catalog of available API resources and the complete schema definition for each. As an example, here are some of the details for the workspaces endpoint in the Asana API documentation.

![Asana workspaces API](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1oHy0OpoAti1AeWGHOHn8QAUKQP1nr72_)

As you think about the data you will need for analytics, don’t forget that Portable offers no-code integrations to other similar applications like [ClickUp](https://portable.io/connectors/clickup), [Monday](https://portable.io/connectors/monday), and [Linear](https://portable.io/connectors/linear) that can be useful for comparison purposes.

Regardless of the SaaS solutions you use, it’s important to find a project management solution with robust data available for analytics.

### Load: Which Destinations Are Best For An Asana ETL Pipeline?

To turn raw data from Asana into dashboards, most companies centralize information into a data warehouse or data lake. For Portable clients, the most common ETL pipelines are:

1. [Asana to Snowflake Integration](https://portable.io/connectors/asana/snowflake)
2. [Asana to Google BigQuery Integration](https://portable.io/connectors/asana/bigquery)
3. [Asana to Amazon Redshift Integration](https://portable.io/connectors/asana/redshift)
4. [Asana to PostgreSQL Integration](https://portable.io/connectors/asana/postgresql)

![Common Data Warehouses](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1dwU6fS5EI2GNuhrY_W6rgEv7ME2UMvLF)

Once you have a destination to load the data, it’s common to combine Asana data with information from other enterprise applications like Jira, Zendesk, Mailchimp, HubSpot, and LinkedIn.
 
From there, you can build cross-functional dashboards in a visualization tool like Power BI, Tableau, Looker, or Retool.

### Develop: Which Dashboards Should You Build With Asana Data?

Now that you’ve identified the data you want to extract, the next step is to plan out the dashboards you can build with the data.
 
As a process, you want to consume raw data, overlay SQL logic, and build a dashboard to either 1) increase revenue or 2) decrease costs.
 
Here are three Asana dashboards you should consider as a starting point.

1. **Open Tasks (By Assignee)** - Does your company use the Asana Tasks functionality within your workspace for project managing tasks? You can build a quick summary of open tasks for each assignee to help to keep everyone in the loop.
2. **Overdue Tasks (By Project)** - Every once in a while, tasks are delayed. Setting up alerts or notifications when tasks are overdue within a project can help your team stay on track.
3. **Average Time To Complete Tasks (By Month Created)** - For operational teams and support teams, the completion time for tasks can be a great metric to help streamline processes. By showing trend data of the average time to complete tasks, you can better understand how your operational initiatives are working and consistently strive to support clients in real time.

Beyond the dashboards above, replicating Asana data into your cloud data warehouse can unlock a wide array of opportunities to power analytics, automate workflows, and develop products. The use cases are endless.

Now that we have a clear sense of the insights we can create, let’s compare the process of developing a custom Asana integration with the benefits of using a no-code ETL solution like Portable.

## Method 1: Building A Custom Asana ETL Pipeline

To build your own Asana integration, there are three steps:
 
1) Navigate the Asana API documentation
2) Make your first API request
3) Turn an API request into a complete data pipeline
 
Let’s walk through the process in more detail.

### How To Interpret Asana’s API Documentation

When reading API documentation, there are a handful of key concepts to consider.

#### Authentication

There are many common authentication mechanisms. OAuth 2.0 (Auth Code and Client Credentials), API Keys, JWT Tokens, Personal Access Tokens, Basic Authentication, etc. For Asana, it’s important to identify the authentication mechanism and how best to incorporate the necessary credentials into your API requests.

Asana uses OAuth 2.0 Auth Code for authentication. Developers need to create an application with a client ID and client secret, redirect users to an authentication URL, and generate a token. Once a bearer token is generated, it is added to the API header for every request.

![Asana Authentication Overview](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1k-NbAWcaBDco6X6nlRelzbxmezZK4lmY)

Alternatively, for personal use, a [personal access token](https://developers.asana.com/docs/personal-access-token) can be generated under “Manage Developer Apps” to grant access.

#### Authorization

In addition to understanding how to authenticate with the Asana API, it’s also important to understand the permissions and scopes necessary to make calls to various API endpoints and how access is granted to users and systems.

To grant access to the Asana API, a user can either generate a personal access token or authorize a third party via the OAuth Auth Code flow. Asana offers [scopes](https://developers.asana.com/docs/oauth-scopes) that can be leveraged in the OAuth flow.

#### Resources

It’s important to identify the Asana API endpoints you want to use for analytics. Most APIs offer GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE methods; however, for analytics, GET requests are typically the most useful. At times, POST requests can be used to extract data as well.
 
For Asana, the workspaces endpoint is a great place to get started.
 
GET https://app.asana.com/api/1.0/workspaces
 
#### Request Parameters

For each API endpoint, you would like to use for analytics, you need to understand the method (GET, POST, PUT, or DELETE) and the URL (i.e. https://app.asana.com/api/1.0/workspaces) but there are other considerations to take into account as well. You should look out for pagination mechanics, query parameters, and parameters that are added to the request path.

Asana uses limit and offset parameters for pagination.

![Asana Pagination Overview](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1fgN-Ei3rkTJMr0muyokeHgF7xI2dikaK)

Some API endpoints require unique identifiers from a previous API response to be included in the URL path. For instance, to get all projects in a workspace, you need a workspace_gid that is returned from another endpoint.

![Asana Workspace Projects Request Parameters](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1OQb3t_EuzRjwTU3CivfbLvPt-NdZz8fu)

### How Do You Call The Asana API? (Tutorial)

1. Follow the instructions above to read the Asana API documentation
2. Identify and collect your credentials for authentication
3. Pick the API resource you want to pull data from
4. Configure the necessary parameters, method, and URL to make your first request (Either with curl, or Postman)
5. Add your credentials and make your first API call. Here is an example request using curl (without real credentials):

```
curl -X GET https://app.asana.com/api/1.0/workspaces \
  -H 'Accept: application/json' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer {access-token}'
```

### How Do You Maintain A Custom Asana ETL Pipeline?

Making a call to the Asana API is just the beginning of maintaining a complete custom ETL pipeline. 
 
Here is a getting started guide to building a production-grade pipeline for Asana:

- For each API endpoint, define schemas (which fields exist and the type for each)
- Process the API response and parse the data (typically parsing JSON or XML)
- Handle and replicate nested objects and custom fields
- Identify which fields are primary keys and which keys are required vs. optional
- Version control your changes in a git-based workflow (using GitHub, GitLab, etc.)
- Handle code dependencies in your toolchain and the upgrades that come with each
- Monitor the health of the upstream API, and - when things go wrong - troubleshoot via the status page, reach out to support, and open tickets
- Handle error codes (HTTP error codes like 400s, 500s, etc.)
- Manage and respect rate limits imposed by the server

We won’t go into detail on all of the items above, but rate limits are a great example of the complexity found in a production-grade data pipeline.
 
For rate limits, Asana has two tiers depending on the domain type (Free vs. Premium). Free domains can make up to 150 requests per minute while Premium accounts can make up to 1500 requests per minute.

![Asana Rate Limits](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1KMLHYSp0jTgTk_Sw1gkhU4NBeCbKIz-7)

If you don’t respect rate limits, and if you can’t handle server responses (like 429 errors with a Retry-After header), your pipeline can break, and analytics can become out-of-date.

### What Are The Drawbacks Of Building An Asana ETL Pipeline Yourself?

You can probably tell at this point that there is a lot of work that goes into building and maintaining an ETL pipeline from Asana to your data warehouse.
 
If you want less development work,  faster insights, and no ongoing responsibilities, you should consider a cloud-hosted ETL solution.
 
Let’s walk through the setup process for a no-code ETL solution and its benefits.

## Method 2: Using A No-Code Asana ETL Solution

No-code ETL solutions are simple. Vendors are specialized in building and maintaining data pipelines on your behalf. Instead of starting from scratch for each integration. Companies like Portable can create [connector templates](https://portable.io/connectors) that can be leveraged by hundreds or thousands of clients.

### Step-By-Step Tutorial For Configuring An Asana ETL Pipeline

Off-the-shelf ETL tools offer a no-code setup process. Here are the instructions to connect Asana to your cloud data warehouse with Portable.

1. [Create an account](https://app.portable.io/login) (no credit card required)
2. Add a source - Search for and select Asana
3. Authenticate with Asana using the instructions in the Portable console
4. Select your warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or PostgreSQL) and authenticate
5. Set up a flow connecting Asana to your analytics environment
6. Run your flow to replicate data from Asana to your warehouse
7. Use the dropdown to set your data flow to run on a cadence

## What Are The Benefits Of Using Portable For Asana ETL?

### No-Code Simplicity

Start moving Asana data in minutes. Save yourself the headaches of reading API documentation, writing code, and worrying about maintenance. Leave the hassle to us.

### Easy To Understand [Pricing](https://portable.io/pricing)

With predictable, fixed-cost pricing per data flow, you know exactly how much your Asana integration will cost every month.

### Fast Development Speeds

Access lightning-fast connector development. Portable can build new integrations on-demand in hours or days.

### Hands-On Support

APIs change. Schemas evolve. Asana will have maintenance issues and errors. With Portable, we will do everything in our power to make your life easier.

### Unlimited Data Volumes

You can move as much Asana data as you want without worrying about usage credits or overages. Instead of analyzing your ETL costs, you should be analyzing your data.

### Free To Get Started

Sign up and get started for free. You don’t need a credit card to manually trigger a data sync, so you can try all of our connectors before paying a dime.

ETL Asana to your data warehouse for analytics

Select your warehouse to see the benefits of connecting Asana for analytics

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