Sigma Embedded Analytics Methodology Whitepaper

This whitepaper provides a blueprint for you to start your journey with embedding Sigma in your applications. We provide links to relevant features that you will need to hit the ground running and identify the typical roles responsible for each step.

  • Administrative Activities

    These activities are performed by your Sigma administrator.

    1. To start building the assets that will be embedded, connect Sigma to your warehouse to start exploring data.
    2. Create a team for internal data analysts (internal_data_analyst_team) responsible for developing Sigma datasets.
    3. Create a team for internal resources (internal_dashboard_dev_team) responsible for developing dashboards to be embedded.
    4. Create a team (e.g. all_clients_team) that every embed user will be a member of.
    5. Create a team for each customer of yours. Users from each customer will become members of the respective team. You can use Sigma’s team creation API to automate the creation of customer team’s when you onboard a new customer in your application.
    6. Create account types to map with the embedding license tiers you wish to provide to your customers.
    7. Create user attributes to represent the dimensions that control how data is segregated for each user.
    8. Generate an embed secret that will be used to make embed URLs immutable.

  • Build Secure Datasets

    This activity is performed by your internal data analysts. They need to create a Sigma dataset for each data domain that will be used in embedded dashboards. Each dataset should utilize the user attribute values passed through the embed URL to implement row-level security and only return rows relevant for the user logged-in to your application.

  • Build Sigma Workbooks to Embed

    This activity is performed by your internal dashboard development resources. Simply utilize the secure datasets built by your data analyst team to build dashboards to be embedded. You can decide to embed a single visualization, a page or the entire workbook.

  • Develop Embed API

    This activity is performed by your application’s back-end developers. They need to develop a simple back-end API in your language of choice that is responsible for generating a secure URL each time a user accesses an embed through your application. The API needs to use the embed secret generated by your Sigma administrator to secure the URL. The URL includes several parameters that are explained here.

  • Add Embed iFrame to your Application

    This activity is performed by your application’s front-end developers. They need to modify your applications’s front-end to include iFrames where Sigma embeds will be displayed. They also need to invoke the embed API developed in the previous step to retrieve the embed URL each time an embed iFrame is accessed and to use the URL returned by the embed API as the iFrame’s source.

    You are now ready to unleash the power of embedded analytics through your application.

We are Sigma.

Sigma is a cloud-native analytics platform that uses a familiar spreadsheet interface to give business users instant access to explore and get insights from their cloud data warehouse. It requires no code or special training to explore billions of rows, augment with new data, or perform “what if” analysis on all data in real⁠-⁠time.

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