Create Reports from Asana Data in Looker Studio

Looker Studio, formerly known as Google Data Studio, empowers users to craft customized reports featuring data visualizations that can be shared with clients while reflecting your brand identity. When combined with CData Connect AI, you gain immediate cloud-to-cloud access to Asana data to create visualizations, dashboards, and more. This article provides step-by-step instructions on establishing a virtual database for Asana and generating reports from Asana data within Looker Studio.

CData Connect AI offers a seamless cloud-to-cloud interface tailored for Asana, making it straightforward to construct reports directly from live Asana data within Looker Studio without the need for data replication. As you create visualizations, Looker Studio generates queries to retrieve data. With its inherent optimized data processing capabilities, CData Connect AI efficiently channels all supported query operations, including filters, JOINs, and more, directly to Asana. This leverages server-side processing to swiftly provide the requested Asana data.

Configure Asana Connectivity for Looker Studio

Connectivity to Asana from Looker Studio is made possible through CData Connect AI. To work with Asana data from Looker Studio, we start by creating and configuring a Asana connection.

1. Log into Connect AI, click Sources, and then click Add Connection
👁 Adding a Connection

2. Select "Asana" from the Add Connection panel
👁 Selecting a data source

3. Enter the necessary authentication properties to connect to Asana.

   You can optionally set the following to refine the data returned from Asana.

   • WorkspaceId: Set this to the globally unique identifier (gid) associated with your Asana Workspace to only return projects from the specified workspace. To get your workspace id, navigate to https://app.asana.com/api/1.0/workspaces while logged into Asana. This displays a JSON object containing your workspace name and Id.
   • ProjectId: Set this to the globally unique identifier (gid) associated with your Asana Project to only return data mapped under the specified project. Project IDs can be found in the URL of your project's Overview page. This will be the numbers directly after /0/.

   Connect Using OAuth Authentication

   You must use OAuth to authenticate with Asana. OAuth requires the authenticating user to interact with Asana using the browser. See the "Getting Started" chapter of the help documentation for a guide to using OAuth.

   👁 Configuring a connection (Salesforce is shown)
   
4. Click Save & Test
5. Navigate to the Permissions tab in the Add Asana Connection page and update the User-based permissions. 👁 Updating permissions
   

With the connection configured, you are ready to connect to Asana data from Looker Studio.

Visualize Live Asana Data from Looker Studio

The steps below outline connecting to CData Connect AI from Looker Studio to create a new Asana data source and build a simple visualization from the data.

1. Log into Looker Studio, click data sources, create a new data source, and choose CData Connect AI Connector.
👁 Create a new connection in Looker Studio

2. Click Authorize and allow access to your Google account. 👁 Granting permissions to the Connector
   
3. Click Authorize to authenticate with your CData Connect AI instance 👁 Authenticating with CData Connect AI
   
4. In the CData Connect AI Connector in Looker Studio select Connections to import from the dropdown and click Next
👁 Importing from Connections

5. Now select a Connection (e.g. Asana1) and click Next 👁 Selecting a Connection
   
6. Select a Table (e.g. projects) or use a Custom Query and click Connect to continue 👁 Selecting a Table
   
7. If needed, modify columns, click Create Report, and add the data source to the report.
👁 Configuring column definitions

8. Select a visualization style and add it to the report.
9. Select Dimensions and Measures to customize your visualization.
👁 Visualizing Asana data in Looker Studio

Live Access to Asana Data from Cloud Applications

Now you have a direct, cloud-to-cloud connection to live Asana data from your Looker Studio workbook. You can create more data sources and new visualizations, build reports, and more — all without replicating Asana data.

Try CData Connect AI and get real-time data access to hundreds of SaaS, Big Data, and NoSQL sources directly from your cloud applications.