Documenting what data is available in Data Studio (to users who don't have access)

Danny Roden

A question that cropped up earlier today was: 'how can we avoid different users connecting to the same data in different spaces?'

Depending on how you've setup Data Studio and the processes around how your users work with it, this can be a bit of a challenge to tackle at the moment. However there's a solution, which is helpful for other 'system admin' reporting tasks too, that I thought worth sharing with you via a quick post.

This post highlights an example of how we, within our Data Office, have setup Data Studio in a way that addresses this and we do this by sharing a list of all the data in the 'Master Data Source space' with all users (via a globally shared View) which looks a little like this:

This is shared as an interactive view, allowing users (even those without access to the data these records relate to) to understand the schema of these tables by right-clicking to drilldown further:

This allows the user to then see the columns in the selected dataset (in this example it's Accounts data from SalesForce):

By publishing this in an accessible manner, it's easy for users without access to the data they need to easily see whether it's already available or not (in the master data space which they won't have access to). And then they can either: (a) request access to it via a shared View which the Data Office team can grant through Data Studio after the purpose of the request has been captured and recorded. Or (b) they can request that their required data source is added to the master data source, or added to their own space (depending on the data type).

If you'd like to set this up for yourself, the first step is to connect to the metadata from Data Studio's repository (in this case the list of datasets) as a source. The best way to do this, is to use the Autonomous REST connector to pull this in via the API.

The main steps to do this are:

1. To generate an API key for Data Studio https://docs.experianaperture.io/data-quality/aperture-data-studio-v2/extend-data-studio-functionality/use-the-rest-api/#apikeys
2. Create a new External System using the Autonomous REST connector
3. Provide a rest config file on the server (note this is available in the following post)

This is not actually as daunting as it sounds and @Henry Simms has already provided the steps to do this yourself in the following post:

https://community.experianaperture.io/discussion/960/aperture-rest-api-calls-as-datasets-within-aperture

Once you've got this connection setup you'll be able to not only pull a list of what data is available in each space but also start to create other reports/charts for administrative purposes such as:

• Which users have access to what spaces (and to what level)
• Flag data that is approaching expiry
• Identify the most and least active users (by analysing 'session' data)
• Spot jobs that are taking a long time
• And much more…

I hope you find this post useful, please let me know in the comments. If you're looking to capture management information on Data Studio activity, surface information on objects within the product or otherwise interested in this content please let us know in the comments. We're currently exploring several product enhancements in this area and we'd love to get your feedback and ideas.

Thanks,

Danny

George_Stephen

This sounds great! This exactly what we need as administrators. But setting up seems complicated.

Could you please create a "Admin Space" and make this data available to administrators by default. Please take this as a suggestion for future release.

In any database like Oracle, the Administrators have an easy way to get the table details like all_tables views in Oracle.

Mirjam Schuke

We have noted it George, thank you. Any other customers please feel free to add to this thread.

Danny Roden

@Rachael @KatriM keen to get your thoughts on this topic

Slimani

Ai,

Agree 100%

This is a fantastic idea if we can manage some configuration within a specific space dedicated to admin.

It would b e very helpful

Rachael

@Danny Roden I agree with the comment about having an admin space - would definitely help with the administration side of Aperture and having something out of the box.

I had a go at setting this up today and it worked really well. We follow a similar process in Speedy where we have source spaces, and data is shared to team spaces via views so we can control who has access to what. This is a great way of them being able to see what other data is available.

One quick question though - how did you format it to get the RAG on the refresh date?

Danny Roden

Ah! the RAG question is answered via emojis (top tip, you can press WINDOWS + FULLSTOP to bring up the emoji keyboard and can use this to inject colour/imagery/visual cues anywhere in Data Studio can supports strings). For the specific example above it was used in a CONCATENATE function coupled with some IF THEN ELSE logic.

I use emojis in functions, space names and dashboard content quite regularly.

Here's an example of it being used in a function:

https://community.experianaperture.io/discussion/568/convert-boolean

Danny Roden

Thanks for the feedback everyone, this is really useful and being taken on board. We'll feedback on Community as and when we have news in this space.