What is a data source?

A data source is a supported database or application housing the data you’d like to access.

When you connect a data source to Atlassian Analytics, it creates a live read-only connection to that data source. This means when you query the data source in Atlassian Analytics, you’ll get the most up-to-date data that’s available in it for your charts and dashboards.

Atlassian data sources

We offer two Atlassian data sources to connect to:

• The Atlassian Data Lake, which gives you access to your organization’s product data. Read how to connect to the Atlassian Data Lake.

• Jira Align Enterprise Insights, which gives you access to your organization’s Jira Align data. Read how to connect to Jira Align Enterprise Insights.

We offer a special Atlassian data source that gives you access to your organization’s product data. Learn how to connect to the Atlassian Data Lake.

Third-party data sources

Atlassian Analytics also lets you connect to your third-party data sources. For greater insights, you can blend your Atlassian data and your third-party data together into a single chart.

The supported data sources include:

Learn more about connecting to third-party data sources.

Note that Atlassian Analytics cannot connect directly to databases on local machines.

Maximum number of connections

In each Analytics workspace, your organization can create up to ten connections to the Atlassian Data Lake and an unlimited number of connections to third-party data sources.

Maximum tables and columns per schema

There’s a maximum limit of 5,000 tables and 50,000 columns per schema in a data source.

If you hit these limits, limit the access of the database user you provide in the data source connection details, if possible. Grant it access to only the essential tables that you need to include in Atlassian Analytics.

Read-only connections

By default, Atlassian Analytics sets data sources to read-only at the connection level. This provides an added layer of security against malicious queries.

Some databases, such as Redshift, disallow some functions when connections are set to read-only. For example, you won’t be able to create variables and temporary tables. For this reason, we allow Redshift users to disable the enforcement of read-only in their data source settings if needed.

If you see an error message like Error: Transaction is read-only, disabling the read-only setting should resolve this issue.

Even with read-only disabled, your database is still protected from malicious queries. Atlassian Analytics blocks queries containing malicious keywords. For more protection, we also recommend creating a specific read-only database user for Atlassian Analytics. Read about restricted SQL commands.

TLS encryption

Atlassian Analytics encrypts database connections with TLS but does not provide hostname validation. This may allow man-in-the-middle attacks to happen undetected. 

Man-in-the-middle attacks allow unauthorized third parties to eavesdrop or potentially modify the data being transmitted. Without TLS hostname or certificate verification on a connection, Atlassian Analytics is unable to confirm the certificate being used for encryption is actually coming from the intended source.

We do not recommend establishing connections to sensitive data. Additionally, we recommend understanding the risks before connecting PostgreSQL or MySQL databases.