Microsoft Teams to Google Data Studio

This page provides you with instructions on how to extract data from Microsoft Teams and analyze it in Google Data Studio. (If the mechanics of extracting data from Microsoft Teams 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 Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams is a suite of tools that provides video, voice, and text chat, along with the ability to collaborate on Microsoft Office documents, to users on Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android platforms. It's included free as part of Microsoft Office 365, the company's SaaS office suite.

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 Microsoft Teams

Microsoft lets developers interact with Teams objects through the RESTful Graph API that lets developers fetch information about teams, channels, schedules, and other objects. For example, to list the members of a team, you would call GET https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/teams/{teamsId}/members.

Sample Microsoft Teams data

Here's an example of the kind of response you might see with a query like the one above.

{
    "@odata.context": "https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/$metadata#teams('ee0f5ae2-8bc6-4ae5-8466-7daeebbfa062')/members",
    "@odata.count": 2,
    "value": [
        {
            "@odata.type": "#microsoft.graph.aadUserConversationMember",
            "id": "ZWUwZjVhZTItOGJjNi00YWU1LTg0NjYtN2RhZWViYmZhMDYyIyM3Mzc2MWYwNi0yYWM5LTQ2OWMtOWYxMC0yNzlhOGNjMjY3Zjk=",
            "roles": [],
            "displayName": "Amos True",
            "userId": "73761f06-2ac9-469c-9f10-279a8cc267f9",
            "email": "AmosT@M365x987948.OnMicrosoft.com"
        },
        {
            "@odata.type": "#microsoft.graph.aadUserConversationMember",
            "id": "ZWUwZjVhZTItOGJjNi00YWU1LTg0NjYtN2RhZWViYmZhMDYyIyM1OThlZmNkNC1lNTQ5LTQwMmEtOTYwMi0wYjUwMjAxZmFlYmU=",
            "roles": [
                "owner"
            ],
            "displayName": "MOD Administrator",
            "userId": "598efcd4-e549-402a-9602-0b50201faebe",
            "email": "admin@M365x987948.OnMicrosoft.com"
        }
    ]
}

Preparing Microsoft Teams data

If you don't already have a data structure in which to store the data you retrieve, you'll have to create a schema for your data tables. Then, for each value in the response, you'll need to identify a predefined datatype (INTEGER, DATETIME, etc.) and build a table that can receive them. Microsoft's documentation should tell you what fields are provided by each endpoint, along with their corresponding datatypes.

Complicating things is the fact that the records retrieved from the source may not always be "flat" — some of the objects may actually be lists. In these cases you'll likely have to create additional tables to capture the unpredictable cardinality in each record.

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 Microsoft Teams 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.

The key is to build your script in such a way that it can identify incremental updates to your data. Thankfully, the Graph API results for some endpoints include fields like lastModifiedDateTime that allow you to identify records that are new since your last update (or since the newest record you've copied). Once you've taken new data into account, you can set your script up as a cron job or continuous loop to keep pulling down new data as it appears.

From Microsoft Teams to your data warehouse: An easier solution

As mentioned earlier, the best practice for analyzing Microsoft Teams 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 Microsoft Teams to Redshift, Microsoft Teams to BigQuery, Microsoft Teams to Azure Synapse Analytics, Microsoft Teams to PostgreSQL, Microsoft Teams to Panoply, and Microsoft Teams 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 Microsoft Teams with Google Data Studio. With just a few clicks, Stitch starts extracting your Microsoft Teams 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.