Asana helps you manage marketing campaigns, plan product launches, and keep track of tasks and company projects. Our Asana/Grow integration will help keep your team focused on what needs to be done and visualize how well you use your time to accomplish the things that matter most.
Connecting to Asana
- Click on the Data tab at the top left of the global navigation. You will be brought to your Data Connections.
- Click on the blue Connect button and search for Asana.
- Click on the Asana logo.
- A window will pop up to log in with your Asana credentials. After entering your credentials you will see a green confirmation message that the connection has been made.
Data Warehouse
Asana is on the Grow Data Warehouse, which we highly recommend you use. For more information about warehousing your data, visit the Data Warehouse Help Article.
Tables
The following tables are available in Grow:
- Projects
- Tasks
- Users
- Portfolios
Warehousing your Data
- Starting with the Connections page, navigate to your Asana connection and click on it to open the Connection Details page.
- Select the Manage Connection button inside the Connection Details section to open the warehouse table selection flow.
- If your data source isn't already connected, refer to the earlier section of this article for more details. If your data source is already connected, you can immediately select which tables of data you want to warehouse.
- Once you have finished selecting the data that you want stored in Grow’s Data Warehouse, click the Sync & Store button at the bottom of the Manage Connection page. This will begin the initial population of your warehouse with the tables you defined. Populating your data warehouse for the first time may take a while, even up to several hours.
- While your data is "In Queue" or "Processing", you may continue working within the app.
Sync Interval
Full Sync
The default sync interval is 12 hours per table for the following tables:
- Projects
- Users
Incremental Sync
When incremental sync is available, the default incremental sync interval is 1 hour, while the default full sync interval is 1 week.
Incremental sync is enabled for the following table:
- Tasks
To learn more about sync intervals and how to adjust the default settings, please visit the sync of the Data Warehouse help article.
Direct Query
A direct query connection can be used to pull data into Grow. With abnormal usage, Direct Query can run into API limitations depending on the data source. For this reason, we recommend that you use Grow's Data Warehouse for a more performant, reliable experience.
Endpoints
Below is a list of the reports that the Asana integration offers, along with a description of each report.
- List of projects: List of all projects, active and archived
- Tasks by project: All tasks found under specific projects
- Tasks by tags: All tasks found under specific tags
- Tasks by users: All tasks assigned to specific users
- Tasks by section
- Tasks search
- Tasks stories
- Portfolio
- Portfolio custom fields
Fields within the reports
Each task report contains the following fields:
- Task id, date created, date modified, task name, completed(true/false), date completed, date due, workspace, assignee name, project names, tags, workspace, teams, parent id, parent name, custom fields
The List of Projects report contains the following fields:
- date created, date modified, project owner, project due date, current_status, public(true/false), project name, project id, project notes, project status, archived(true/false), workspace name, team name, project color
Data grouped in Portfolios is available for Asana Enterprise and Business plans.
API Docs
https://developers.asana.com/docs
You should not need to reference these API docs very often.
FAQs + Tips and Tricks
Be specific with what data you pull in.
There will always be tons of data for task and project management. When building a metric in Grow, be very specific in your data parameters so you only bring in the data you plan to visualize. This will speed up the time to load the data. This applicable if you use Direct Query to fetch the data.
Asana’s API has call rate limits.
Depending on how much data you’re trying to pull in, it may either slow down the data pulling in or give you an error. Enabling incremental sync on the Tasks table is a great strategy to reduce the volume of data that you need to pull in at a given time. This applicable if you use Direct Query to fetch the data.
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)
All date and timestamps are stored in UTC. If account timezone settings are set in Grow, these times will adjust accordingly. For more information, visit this Help Center article.
What is the difference between Modified Date and Completed Date?
Asana's API is set up to allow us to bring in data only based on two date choices: Modified Date and Completed Date.
When you use Completed Date, it returns only the tasks that have been completed within your time frame (past 7 days, 30 days back, month to date, etc.).
When you use Modified Date, it only includes tasks that someone on your team has modified in the time frame you choose (past 7 days, month to date, year to date, etc.). Modified Date does not return any tasks that are currently open, only completed tasks.
Many APIs are set up this way in order to streamline the data to the most relevant and applicable to the customer.
Note that on the report "Tasks by User" when you choose Completed Date, there is a checkbox available labeled Incomplete Tasks. If you check this box, your data will only show you the open tasks but not completed ones. This checkbox is only available on this report.
Whenever possible, use Modified Date instead of Completed Date. This will help you narrow down the data you pull in, allowing you to better create plans and push the progress of your team.
When grouping tasks by project name, I get duplicate projects in my list. Why is that?
In Asana you can assign one task to multiple projects. When we pull in Asana data, we’re pulling individual tasks. If a task is assigned to multiple projects, then the Project column will include a comma separated list of all the projects that task is associated with. This makes grouping difficult.
If your Asana business practice requires this, talk to your assigned Customer Success team to discuss options and workarounds.
Tags can get messy. What are your recommended best practices?
Tags can get out of hand unless your organization is conscious of keeping them organized and concise. Asana does a great job of showing the tags team members have used in the past to select from.
Our recommendation is to use custom fields in place of certain types of tags. This will keep your data clean and usable. If you use tags for your business, just make sure to keep them as consistent and organized as possible.
What should I know about custom fields?
We highly recommend you use Asana's custom fields! It is a useful place for tracking company milestones and goals, status of task, priority levels etc. You can also use custom fields to track customer information and project management data. Here are a few things to know:
- Try to avoid the text field if you want to analyze the data. Free text entry is useful for notes, but there is no way to take those notes and categorize and group them. Instead, using the drop-down option keeps your data consistent and usable for data transforms.
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Adding custom fields will add a new column to all reports and shift your
data. This may throw off any column aggregations you’ve created in Grow.
- You can avoid this by using the Column Cleanup transform to only see the columns you want to use in the metric. Any additional columns won’t be included in your data and won’t shift your data.
- You can also use Spreadsheet Functions for key values or try to get all custom fields needed by your business in place in Asana before building out your metrics.
Why does it take so long to load my data in Direct Query?
Data from task and project management platforms are always numerous and can slow down the time to load. When building an Asana metric in Grow, be specific in your data parameters so you only bring in the data you plan to visualize. This will speed up the load time. Some tips include:
- Warehouse your tables.
- When creating a report of incomplete tasks by assignee, limit that report to show only the 5-10 people on your immediate team.
- Only pull data from one project at a time instead of all projects.
- Use the incomplete tasks to only see tasks that actively need attention.