Trello to Google Data Studio

This page provides you with instructions on how to extract data from Trello and analyze it in Google Data Studio. (If the mechanics of extracting data from Trello seem too complex or difficult to maintain, check out Stitch, which can do all the heavy lifting for you in just a few clicks.)

What is Trello?

Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes projects into boards, each of which can be filled with lists of notes that outline tasks for a team, complete with photos, documents, and other attachments. It includes tools to comment and collaborate among teammates. You can use it as a web-based project management application.

What is Google Data Studio?

Google Data Studio is a simple dashboard and reporting tool. It's free and easy to use, but it lacks the sophisticated features of higher-end reporting software. Many of the connectors it supports are for Google products, but third parties have written partner connectors to a wide variety of data sources. Its drag-and-drop report editor lets users create about 15 types of charts.

Getting data out of Trello

To claim your data from Trello, you can extract it from Trello's servers using the Trello API, a REST API that exposes endpoints that provide information on boards, lists, cards, and actions. For instance, to get data about a list, you might run /lists/[id].

Sample Trello data

The Trello API returns JSON-formatted data. Here's an example of the kind of response you might see when querying for the details of a list.

[{
    "id": "4efe314cc72846af4e00008a",
    "data": {
        "list": {
            "id": "4eea4ffc91e31d174600004a",
            "name": "To Do Soon"
        },
        "board": {
            "id": "4eea4ffc91e31d1746000046",
            "name": "Example Board"
        },
        "old": {
            "name": "To Do Later"
        }
    },
    "date": "2017-12-30T21:46:52.874Z",
    "idMemberCreator": "4ee7deffe582acdec80000ac",
    "type": "updateList",
    "memberCreator": {
        "id": "4ee7deffe582acdec80000ac",
        "avatarHash": null,
        "fullName": "Joe Tester",
        "initials": "JT",
        "username": "joetester"
    }
}, {
    "id": "4efe3147c72846af4e00006d",
    "data": {
        "list": {
            "id": "4eea4ffc91e31d174600004a",
            "name": "To Do Later"
        },
        "board": {
            "id": "4eea4ffc91e31d1746000046",
            "name": "Example Board"
        },
        "old": {
            "name": "To Do Eventually"
        }
    },
    "date": "2017-12-30T21:46:47.843Z",
    "idMemberCreator": "4ee7deffe582acdec80000ac",
    "type": "updateList",
    "memberCreator": {
        "id": "4ee7deffe582acdec80000ac",
        "avatarHash": null,
        "fullName": "Joe Tester",
        "initials": "JT",
        "username": "joetester"
    }
}]

Preparing Trello data

This part can get tricky: You need to parse the JSON in the API response and map each field to a corresponding table in the destination database. You'll need a solid handle on the datatypes for each endpoint. The Stitch Trello Docs can give you a sense of what datatypes will come through the API.

Loading data into Google Data Studio

Google Data Studio uses what it calls "connectors" to gain access to data. Data Studio comes bundled with 17 connectors, mostly to pull in data from other Google products. It also supports connectors to MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, and offers 200 connectors to other data sources built and supported by partners.

Using data in Google Data Studio

Google Data Studio provides a graphical canvas onto which users drag and drop datasets. Users can set dimensions and metrics, specify sorting and filtering, and tailor the way reports and charts are displayed.

Keeping Trello data up to date

At this point you've coded up a script or written a program to get the data you want and successfully moved it into your data warehouse. But how will you load new or updated data? It's not a good idea to replicate all of your data each time you have updated records. That process would be painfully slow and resource-intensive.

Instead, identify key fields that your script can use to bookmark its progression through the data and use to pick up where it left off as it looks for updated data. Auto-incrementing fields such as updated_at or created_at work best for this. When you've built in this functionality, you can set up your script as a cron job or continuous loop to get new data as it appears in Trello.

And remember, as with any code, once you write it, you have to maintain it. If Trello modifies its API, or the API sends a field with a datatype your code doesn't recognize, you may have to modify the script. If your users want slightly different information, you definitely will have to.

From Trello to your data warehouse: An easier solution

As mentioned earlier, the best practice for analyzing Trello data in Google Data Studio is to store that data inside a data warehousing platform alongside data from your other databases and third-party sources. You can find instructions for doing these extractions for leading warehouses on our sister sites Trello to Redshift, Trello to BigQuery, Trello to Azure Synapse Analytics, Trello to PostgreSQL, Trello to Panoply, and Trello to Snowflake.

Easier yet, however, is using a solution that does all that work for you. Products like Stitch were built to move data automatically, making it easy to integrate Trello with Google Data Studio. With just a few clicks, Stitch starts extracting your Trello data, structuring it in a way that's optimized for analysis, and inserting that data into a data warehouse that can be easily accessed and analyzed by Google Data Studio.