Find Out More About: Ownership and Sharing | Data Studio

How to Setup Google Data Studio’s New IP Address Configuration?

Lachezar Arabadzhiev — Sun, 28 Aug 2022 05:13:24 +0000

Important: IP address changes for firewall access is now active in Google Data Studio.

Google Data Studio is a free tool made by Google for users to create customizable reports and visualizations. You can connect to hundreds of platforms through its data connectors. Some of these platforms may restrict access to data using a firewall for security reasons. For this reason, Google uses specific IP addresses that can access the data through the data connectors.

The IP addresses may change after a certain amount of time, though not quite frequently for convenience. Every time Google Data Studio needs access to certain resources in a database behind a firewall, it has to use the provided addresses. Otherwise it will be unable to fetch data from these sources. The latest update, dated July 14, 2022, affects only sources created by these four connectors.

MySQL
PostgreSQL
Redshift
Microsoft SQL Server 2017

The new IP addresses to use are

142.251.74.0/23
2001:4860:4807::/48 (This is optional for platforms supporting IPv6)
74.125.0.0/16

The current IP addresses will continue working until early 2023. Therefore, to ensure Google Data Studio can continue to connect to your database, you need to use the IP addresses above. The following IP addresses will not work after the deadline.

72.14.192.0/18
108.177.8.0/21
207.126.144.0/20
209.85.128.0/17
64.18.0.0/20
64.233.160.0/19
216.239.32.0/19
173.194.0.0/16
207.126.144.0/20
66.102.0.0/20
66.249.80.0/20

Let’s look at how to connect to the MYSQL connector in Google Data Studio.

How to connect Google Data Studio to MySQL?

Open and sign in to your Google Data Studio account.
Click the “+” button on the top left.

Select “Data source” from the drop-down list.

Pick the MySQL connector. You can also use the search bar to search for your preferred data connector.

Enter your MySQL credentials. You can use an IP address or a hostname. (Host Name/IP, Port, Database Name, Username, Password,) If you choose to access MySQL using the JBDC URL, enter the following credentials (URL, username, Password).

Enable SSL (this is an optional step).

You can connect to your server securely by using TLS/SSL encryption. All you need to do is check the SSL option and then enter your configuration details.

Now, you can “Authenticate”.

Choose a table from the list (You can also create a custom query) and then click “Connect”.

All the dimensions in the database will appear. You can create a report or explore to visualize the data.

Additional steps to visualize your data

Under the “Explore”, you can choose different charts to visualize your data.

For example, Google Data Studio will create a visualization automatically when I choose a Pie chart. But you can edit or create your own custom visualizations as well.

IP Address Important Notes

Google Data Studio cannot access the local host. You need to set a public IP address or hostname.
THE MySQL connector can query a maximum of 150k rows.
Google Data Studio only supports ASCII characters as the column hears/Field names.
The supported MySQL versions are 5.6, 5.7 and 8.0

Final Thoughts

Google Data Studio allows its users to connect to different types of databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft Server, and Redshift. Some may be protected by a firewall; thus, you need to use the provided IP address to connect, which is 142.251.74.0/23 from early 2023. The previous IP addresses will not work.

I hope this was helpful! If you want to learn more, feel free to subscribe to my newsletter or take a look at one of my courses.

Dynamic Dashboards and Data Analysis with Google Data Studio – 2022

If you want to learn how to build powerful data visualizations and unlock insights that can help you drive business results for your clients or employers, take a look at my full course on Udemy.

Google BigQuery for Marketers and Agencies

This course is designed to bridge the gap between data analysis and digital marketing, and help you become a data-driven decision-maker. It covers the more technical aspects of JOINs and data blending as well. You can access the full course here as well.

The post How to Setup Google Data Studio’s New IP Address Configuration? appeared first on Data Studio.

Create a custom e-mail schedule for your reports in Google Data Studio – 2021

Lachezar Arabadzhiev — Mon, 20 Jan 2020 00:57:31 +0000

Wondering how to share your Data Studio Reports with clients? You can easily automate the sharing of your PDF reports and dashboards by creating a personalized e-mail schedule in Google Data Studio. For example, sending an e-mail every Thursday or Saturday. This can be especially important for digital agencies and large corporate clients, where the timing related to report delivery is sensitive. Let’s see how it works:

How to set up your Google Data Studio e-mail delivery?

You can navigate to the “Share” button in any Data Studio report and select the “Schedule email delivery” option. In the pop-up, you have the flexibility to tweak the delivery frequency, pages shared and customize the email subject and message.

Customize email subject and message. Once you tick the box, you can easily write a subject line and leave a message that will be shared every time the report is sent.
Pages. You can select which pages you want to share in your email. The menu allows for multi-select.
Repeat. This option controls the cadence and in addition to the presets (eg. Daily, Weekly on Monday and etc.), you can select a “Custom” schedule, which is quite flexible (below). For example, you can select the frequency and specific start days.

What does the Google Data Studio e-mail look like when it arrives in your client’s inbox?

When the e-mail arrives in your inbox, you will see an inline image, a preview of your report’s first 5 pages. Of course, there will also be an attachment with the PDF version of the report, which can be easily forwarded.

Another benefit is that if your client decides to “reply-to” your scheduled e-mail report, the default recipient is the Data Studio report owner. Therefore, if any questions come up, you will get them immediately.

*In a recent update by Google (April 22, 2021), you would also receive an email if your scheduled email report fails to go out.

*As of 2022, Reports sent as scheduled email or downloaded as PDF now use the report name as the attachment and downloaded file name.

What are the limitations of e-mail delivery?

You can only have one e-mail schedule per report.
You are not able to customize the e-mail address that is sending the scheduled e-mail. All e-mails are coming from Google Data Studio . However, as of recently, all scheduled emails show the sender’s address “via Google Data Studio.”
The owner is always part of the recipient’s list. This can prove to be annoying when you schedule more than 3-4 e-mails.

I hope this was helpful! If you have any questions, feel free to DM me on LinkedIn or subscribe to my newsletter for more updates

Dynamic Dashboards and Data Analysis with Google Data Studio

If you want to learn how to build powerful data visualizations and unlock insights that can help you drive business results for your clients or employers, take a look at my full course on Udemy.

The post Create a custom e-mail schedule for your reports in Google Data Studio – 2021 appeared first on Data Studio.

How to transfer ownership of reports and data sources in Google Data Studio

Lachezar Arabadzhiev — Wed, 15 Jan 2020 02:57:24 +0000

As they say, sharing is caring… and also an important feature in Google Data Studio! You have probably been in a situation, where an employee leaves your agency/company and all the access to reports and data sources leaves with them. The problem is that often, managing data ownership and access level is the aftermath, as opposed to a carefully designed transition process.

In this post, I want to show you how to completely transfer ownership of reports and data sources, so that the new owner is able to edit the report front-end, configure new fields and change the data schema. Plus, a few caveats of access management.

Grant report access

The first thing we would normally do to allow another user to access our Data Studio report is to simply navigate to the “Share” button and assign them a “Can edit” role.

Of course, this would only provide the new user with access to the report charts and fields that are already available. As you can see, the “Data Source” field below does not have an edit option. The separation between the data source and the report itself is also common practice in other data visualization tools. Its main purpose is to add an extra layer of security.

Now, let’s go a step further and share the data source to enable the new user to create dimensions/metrics. You can do that by going to “Data Sources” in the main interface and assign “Can edit” access.

…and voilà, your new user is now able to edit the data source. This includes adding new fields and also changing aggregation and data types to existing fields. Not quite full access yet.

Transfer ownership completely (be careful!!!)

The last and missing piece here is being able to edit the data source connection and update it. This can be achieved by going to the “Data Sources” menu and changing the “Can edit” access to “Make owner”. Bear in mind, once you transfer ownership to someone else, that person can remove your access or modify the data source connection and you will not be able to revoke the connection. Therefore, be careful with the feature, as it is extremely powerful.

When you finally have owner access you would see a few more buttons light up in your Data Studio report. It is a good practice to review access levels of clients and employees that are changing departments or leaving your company. In this way, you can avoid broken reports and missing data sources in the long-run.