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

There are two ways to sync data from Monday 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 Monday 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 Monday To Your Data Warehouse](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1U7_JNmjHKEXheAcFkCDc5k88W3AORYvx)

## How To Create Value With Monday Data

Teams connect Monday to their data warehouse to build dashboards and generate value for their business. Let’s dig into the capabilities Monday 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 Monday data.

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

Monday is a work management solution used for creating workflows and managing projects.

To help clients power downstream analytics, Monday 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.

- Boards
- Board Items
- Items
- Tags
- Teams
- Users
- Etc.

You can visit [the Monday API documentation](https://developer.monday.com/api-reference/docs/basics) 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 boards endpoint in the Monday API documentation.

![Monday boards API](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1IOCBIeuEYwgTkd6ffChdSYU9F7ak27Ft)

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](https://portable.io/connectors/asana), [ClickUp](https://portable.io/connectors/clickup), and [Jira](https://portable.io/connectors/jira) that can be useful for comparison purposes.

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

### Load: Which Destinations Are Best For A Monday ETL Pipeline?

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

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

1. **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.
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 Monday 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 Monday integration with the benefits of using a no-code ETL solution like Portable.

## Method 1: Building A Custom Monday ETL Pipeline

To build your own Monday integration, there are three steps:
 
1) Navigate the Monday 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 Monday’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 Monday, it’s important to identify the authentication mechanism and how best to incorporate the necessary credentials into your API requests.

Monday uses access tokens for authentication. Each access token is a personal access token and can be accessed either via the Admin Tab (for admins) or via the Developer Tab (for members of an account).

![Monday Authentication Overview](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=19KPsWD_ZpNl62TYAmDyROZhN8zr3rjm6)

#### Authorization

In addition to understanding how to authenticate with the Monday 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.

Each token takes on the access levels of the user that generated the token. For instance, a token can access all the boards to which the user has access (i.e they’re subscribed to).

#### Resources

It’s important to identify the Monday 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 Monday, the boards endpoint is a great place to get started.

#### 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.monday.com/v2) 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.

Some API endpoints offer pagination. Becauuse Monday offers a GraphQL API, pagination parameters are passed in the body of the request. 

![Monday Pagination Overview](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1tK0h3ZJX6TBQvexCupTkYPUhOr8cnCU-)

For some API endpoints it can make sense to include nested values in your query.

For instance, to get all items on a board, you can use the boards endpoint, but include the items field with the various details you would like to include in the response.

![Monday API Request Parameters](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1iT5b5o0-IJcm1jhnflczUeb4DzjHYukC)

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

1. Follow the instructions above to read the Monday 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 --location --request POST 'https://api.monday.com/v2' \
--header 'Authorization: YourSuperSecretApiKey' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data-raw '{""query"": ""query { boards (ids: 12345678) { name state board_folder_id owner { id }}}""}'
```

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

Making a call to the Monday 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 Monday:

- 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, Monday uses the concept of Complexity which is not uncommon for GraphQL APIs. This can add complexity both when calculating how many requests you can make over a given time frame, but also when handling errors. When you exceed the rate limit, and error is returned in the body of the request, not as a 429 error with a Retry-After header.

![Monday Rate Limits](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1cJJWkhfpfENJknmuA7Ao0NhpKqtvVbTD)

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 Monday 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 Monday 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 Monday 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](https://portable.io/connectors) that can be leveraged by hundreds or thousands of clients.

### Step-By-Step Tutorial For Configuring A Monday ETL Pipeline

Off-the-shelf ETL tools offer a no-code setup process. Here are the instructions to connect Monday 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 Monday
3. Authenticate with Monday using the instructions in the Portable console
4. Select your warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or PostgreSQL) and authenticate
5. Set up a flow connecting Monday to your analytics environment
6. Run your flow to replicate data from Monday 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 Monday ETL?

### No-Code Simplicity

Start moving Monday 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 Monday 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. Monday 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 Monday 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 Monday to your data warehouse for analytics

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

Stop waiting for your data.Start using Portable today.