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The Two Paths To Connect ClickUp To Your Data Warehouse
There are two ways to sync data from ClickUp 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 ClickUp 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.
How To Create Value With ClickUp Data
Teams connect ClickUp to their data warehouse to build dashboards and generate value for their business. Let’s dig into the capabilities ClickUp 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 ClickUp data.
Extract: What Data Can You Extract From The ClickUp API?
ClickUp is a collaboration solution used for managing projects, tasks, and internal communication.
To help clients power downstream analytics, ClickUp 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.
- Teams
- Team Goals
- Tasks
- Lists
- List Members
- Folders
- Spaces
- Etc.
You can visit the ClickUp API documentation 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 teams endpoint in the ClickUp API documentation.
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 Asana, Monday, and Linear that can be useful for comparison purposes.
Regardless of the SaaS solution you use, it’s important to find a collaboration solution with robust data available for analytics.
Load: Which Destinations Are Best For A ClickUp ETL Pipeline?
To turn raw data from ClickUp into dashboards, most companies centralize information into a data warehouse or data lake. For Portable clients, the most common ETL pipelines are:
- ClickUp to Snowflake Integration
- ClickUp to Google BigQuery Integration
- ClickUp to Amazon Redshift Integration
- ClickUp to PostgreSQL Integration
Once you have a destination to load the data, it’s common to combine ClickUp data with information from other enterprise applications like Jira, Mailchimp, HubSpot, Zendesk, 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 ClickUp Data?
Now that you have 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 project analytics dashboards you should consider as a starting point.
- Open Tasks (By Assignee) - If your team is analyzing tasks, it's easy to build a quick summary of open tasks for each assignee to help to keep everyone in the loop.
- 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.
- 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 ClickUp 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 ClickUp integration with the benefits of using a no-code ETL solution like Portable.
Method 1: Building A Custom ClickUp ETL Pipeline
To build your own ClickUp integration, there are three steps:
- Navigate the ClickUp API documentation
- Make your first API request
- Turn an API request into a complete data pipeline
Let’s walk through the process in more detail.
How To Interpret ClickUp’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 ClickUp, it’s important to identify the authentication mechanism and how best to incorporate the necessary credentials into your API requests.
ClickUp offers two ways to authenticate with the API. The first option is to create a personal token. The second options is to create an application and use the OAuth 2.0 Auth Code flow. In both scenarios, you will receive a token that can be used in the Authorization header of each request to the API.
Authorization
In addition to understanding how to authenticate with the ClickUp 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.
When it comes to access and permissions, personal access tokens offer more limited capabilities than the OAuth 2.0 Auth Code flow. For personal access tokens, a single key is shared with API consumers and if you need to update the key, every consumer will need to be updated.
For OAuth applications, users can grant access to specific workspaces, and can revoke access to a specific API consumer.
Resources
It’s important to identify the ClickUp 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 ClickUp, the teams endpoint is a great place to get started.
GET https://api.clickup.com/api/v2/team
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://api.clickup.com/api/v2/team) 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.
ClickUp sometimes uses pagination, and when they do, they are using a custom mechanism. For instance, if you want to retrieve older comments for a task, you need to include a start_id and start value.
Some API endpoints require unique identifiers from a previous API response to be included in the URL path.
For instance, to get all members of a list, you need a list_id that is returned from another endpoint.
How Do You Call The ClickUp API? (Tutorial)
- Follow the instructions above to read the ClickUp API documentation
- Identify and collect your credentials for authentication
- Pick the API resource you want to pull data from
- Configure the necessary parameters, method, and URL to make your first request (Either with curl or Postman)
- Add your credentials and make your first API call. Here is an example request using curl (without real credentials):
curl --request GET \
--url 'https://api.clickup.com/api/v2/team' \
--header 'authorization: access_token'
How Do You Maintain A Custom ClickUp ETL Pipeline?
Making a call to the ClickUp 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 ClickUp:
- 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, ClickUp rate limits each token based on the plan you have subscribed to.
You will receive a HTTP 429 error code if you exceed the rate limit.
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 A ClickUp 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 ClickUp 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 ClickUp 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 create connector templates that can be leveraged by hundreds or thousands of clients.
Step-By-Step Tutorial For Configuring A ClickUp ETL Pipeline
Off-the-shelf ETL tools offer a no-code setup process. Here are the instructions to connect ClickUp to your cloud data warehouse with Portable.
- Create an account (no credit card required)
- Add a source - Search for and select ClickUp
- Authenticate with ClickUp using the instructions in the Portable console
- Select your warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or PostgreSQL) and authenticate
- Set up a flow connecting ClickUp to your analytics environment
- Run your flow to replicate data from ClickUp to your warehouse
- Use the dropdown to set your data flow to run on a cadence
What Are The Benefits Of Using Portable For ClickUp ETL?
No-Code Simplicity
Start moving ClickUp 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
With predictable, fixed-cost pricing per data flow, you know exactly how much your ClickUp 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. ClickUp 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 ClickUp 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.