Excel Spreadsheet Automation on Rootly Data with the QUERY Formula

Jerod Johnson
Jerod Johnson
Director, Technology Evangelism
Pull data from Rootly, automate spreadsheets, and more with the QUERY formula.

The CData Excel Add-In for Rootly provides formulas that can query Rootly data. The following three steps show how you can automate the following task: Search Rootly data for a user-specified value and then organize the results into an Excel spreadsheet.

The syntax of the CDATAQUERY formula is the following:

=CDATAQUERY(Query, [Connection], [Parameters], [ResultLocation]);

This formula requires three inputs:

  • Query: The declaration of the Rootly data records you want to retrieve, written in standard SQL.
  • Connection: Either the connection name, such as APIConnection1, or a connection string. The connection string consists of the required properties for connecting to Rootly data, separated by semicolons.

    Using API Key Authentication

    To authenticate using an API key, you will need to obtain your API key from your Rootly account settings.

    To get your API key:

    1. Log in to your Rootly account
    2. Navigate to Settings > API & Integrations
    3. Click on "API Tokens"
    4. Copy the generated token

    After setting the following connection properties, you are ready to connect:

    • AuthScheme: Set this to APIKey.
    • APIKey: Set this to your Rootly API token.

    Example Connection String

    Profile=Rootly.apip;Authscheme=APIKey;ProfileSettings="APIKey=your_apikey";
    
  • ResultLocation: The cell that the output of results should start from.

Pass Spreadsheet Cells as Inputs to the Query

The procedure below results in a spreadsheet that organizes all the formula inputs in the first column.

  1. Define cells for the formula inputs. In addition to the connection inputs, add another input to define a criterion for a filter to be used to search Rootly data, such as Status.
  2. In another cell, write the formula, referencing the cell values from the user input cells defined above. Single quotes are used to enclose values such as addresses that may contain spaces.
  3. =CDATAQUERY("SELECT * FROM Incidents WHERE Status = '"&B5&"'","Profile="&B1&";Authscheme="&B2&";ProfileSettings="&B3&";Provider=API",B6)
  4. Change the filter to change the data.

Ready to get started?

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