Welcome to our 30-day success guide for onboarding Fivetran at your organization! You completed your Free Trial, but you’ve only just scratched the surface of what you can accomplish with automated data movement. 

In this blog post, we’ll provide tangible tips to maximize your success over the next 30 days and increase your impact using Fivetran. From creating an implementation plan to forecasting usage, each step will help you cover your bases and become a data automation whiz in no time. 

Let's dive in!

Goal 1: Plan the path to success

Often, engineers and analysts have a backlog of projects and requests from stakeholders across the company. Having a clear plan in place will help you achieve your goals, provide visibility into your priorities and maximize your impact in the short and long term. 

Create an implementation plan and focus on priorities

Start with an implementation plan! We’ve created this simple template that should help you map your integrations and move forward with a plan.

Here’s how to use it: 

1. Meet with your project and executive stakeholders to discuss immediate and long-term data priorities for the business.
2. Write down business goals and map out which sources you need to connect to reach them. 
3. Align on KPIs for success. For example, reduced engineering hours to deliver pipelines, reduced time to onboard new sources, improved analytics for BI reporting.
4. Include estimated timelines for each project, who is responsible and identify security, legal and compliance dependencies.
5. Review with your stakeholders to ensure you’re aligned on priorities and next steps.
6. Continue to update your plan as you move forward!

This will give you structure and peace-of-mind, and provide your wider team with visibility into your plan of action and progress.

💡DID YOU KNOW: If Fivetran doesn’t have a connector for your data source, you have two options at your disposal to create custom connectors with all the benefits of Fivetran, without the heavy-lifting of DIY pipelines:

1. Build a custom connector with Connector SDK: write Python code within our secure cloud environment to quickly build and deploy connectors with critical features, such as indempotence, re-syncs, and failure recovery.
2. Request a Lite Connector: Submit a request for Fivetran to build a Lite Connector. If approved, we work with your team to build a lite connector in just a few weeks. 

This way, you can include your custom pipelines all managed in a single platform: Fivetran.

Begin exploring your databases

Your databases contain the heart of how your business runs. Product and transactional data from your databases makes analytics reporting across the board more meaningful. But how do you get started? We recommend reading database documentation, starting conversations with internal stakeholders like your database owners or database architect and socializing our trust center with your data security champions. 

Already have your database connected? Read our seven essential database schema best practices.

Goal 2: Connect high-priority sources

With a plan in place, you’re ready to start connecting high-priority sources that bring impact to your business. As a Fivetran customer, you get 14 days free for every new connection! This includes a free historical sync and a usage estimate 7 days into your trial period. Continue using your implementation plan as a checklist to help you manage your 14-day free trials and maximize success.

Follow these steps to run a free 14-day connection trial:

Before you get started, ensure you have at least one destination connected in your Fivetran account. Click here to add a destination, or watch this video to learn how.

1. Pre-read the connector ERD (Entity Relationship Diagram) and set up documentation. An ERD is a blueprint that shows how the data will be loaded and organized into your destination. Here’s the ERD for Shopify, for example. In addition, setup documentation will help you understand prerequisites, important connection methods, and if you need permission from legal, security, or data owners before jumping in.
2. Add a connector.
3. Start your free, initial sync. Once the sync completes, your free 14-day connector trial begins!
4. Go check how the data has landed in your destination! This is the exciting part! Now that you can see all your data in the destination, conduct an audit on your dataset to ensure you are bringing in the data that you need.  
5. Adjust your sync frequency.
6. Understand your pricing estimate. Seven days after the initial sync for any new connector, you’ll get a usage and pricing estimate. Review with your stakeholders, pause any irrelevant tables, then discuss positive business outcomes and next steps.
7. Review free trial settings. On the status page, you can view when your free use ends and when we’ll provide a usage estimate. After the free trial period ends, your connection will remain on and you’ll automatically begin to pay for usage unless you change this setting. You can always pause or unpause connections later.

Watch this video to learn more about 14-day connection trials

Set Up transformations

Data transformation is essential for creating clear, actionable reports, dashboards and visualizations. There are three ways you can transform your data with Fivetran:

1. Starting fresh? Get going with Quickstart. Jumpstart your data transformation process with Quickstart. Access pre-built data models for over 50 sources—all integrated within a unified platform.*
2. Add our pre-built data models to your dbt project. Transform and model data in your preferred environment using your existing dbt projects. Seamlessly orchestrate and manage model runs within Fivetran.* [Discover Fivetran Data Models →]
3. Harness our integration with dbt Cloud™ or Coalesce. Simplify orchestration and troubleshooting of your entire data pipeline directly through the Fivetran UI, using dbt Cloud™ or Coalesce orchestration tools.

*We charge for Quickstart Data Models and Fivetran Transformations for dbt Core™. Learn more.  

Watch this video to learn more about how to set up transformations

Create data visualizations or automations

Data on its own is just data. You need to create new reports or dashboards so your team can derive insights, or automate processes from regularly synced data so your business maximizes value.

Here are some example visualizations to get you inspired:

1. Billing and revenue dashboards
2. Financial reporting dashboards
3. Customer support reporting
4. Email campaign analysis

Share progress with stakeholders

It’s important to keep stakeholders in the loop when you’ve connected new sources. Ensure they are aware and getting value out of newly synced data. 

Discuss questions such as: 

• How are you using the data so far?
• What would happen if you didn’t have this data?
• Is there any data you don’t need?
• Is there data we don’t have from missing sources that would bring value to your team and our business?

Goal 3: Become an expert in your usage and pipeline activity

Now, let’s focus on fundamentals of usage, alerts and monitoring. 

How to understand your usage

As a quick refresher, you only pay for what you use each month.

You can view your usage and total spend each month on your usage page. There, you can drill down further into your usage: where it increased, decreased, top sources for usage and more.

Set up usage and spend alerts

Similar to a credit card, you can set up alerts if your spend exceeds a threshold in Fivetran! If you have a strict budget, set up alerts on your billing page. 

We recommend setting this to 75%-90% of your comfortable limit, so you get notified before exceeding it. For example, if your budget is $400, set your alert threshold between $300 and $360.

Learn more: how to control costs and set up alerts

Achieve seamless monitoring with Fivetran’s free Platform Connector

Fivetran’s Platform Connector provides visibility into your Fivetran pipelines and usage right in your destination or business intelligence (BI) tools. Every time you add a new destination, we automatically add the free Platform Connector. Your Fivetran log data – including sync statistics, user activities on each connector, instance performance and usage – will then land in your destination. Check out the ERD here. 

Get out-of-the-box Fivetran Platform reporting in 3 easy steps:

1. [Optional] Add Fivetran’s Platform Connector. (Here’s how)
2. View and query Fivetran logs in your destination. Here are some sample queries to get you started.
3. Create visualizations in your BI tool for any end user or business stakeholder to view. (Learn how)

🧠 Get inspired! Learn how Fivetran uses Fivetran’s Platform Connector in-house!

Optimize and forecast your usage

Do you want to forecast how increased usage impacts your overall monthly costs before you add new sources? Or maybe after you’ve added valuable sources, and now your total usage exceeds your budget. In that case, consider turning off tables that aren’t adding value to your business. Simulate your monthly pricing with different volumes of usage in your usage estimator without impacting your setup or billing.

In the example below, we’re forecasting “planned monthly costs” for potential additional usage. 

When your usage estimates for new connectors are available, this will change your planned monthly cost, helping you get a full view on how new connectors will impact your monthly billing and usage before making a decision.

Learn more: 6 tips to understand, forecast, and optimize your usage

Goal 4: Set up your team for scale

Share pipeline workload and management  

Now that you’ve mastered the basics of your Fivetran account, you’re ready to invite your coworkers to help field new connector requests across the business. By sharing pipeline management with teams outside the data org, you democratize data access and break down bottlenecks to accelerate time-to-insights.

You can easily invite new users with role-based access, ensuring tight governance at the top of your pipeline. 

How to get your coworkers up and running:

Steps to getting started

1: Manage your authentication settings

Configure SSO with SAML in 3 simple steps to ensure your connection and sign-on methods are secure.

2. Add teammates

Start adding users under Account Settings.

3: Set their permissions

Assign granular user permissions with role-based access control to ensure all users have the clearance required to perform their roles, but no more.

For Enterprise and Business Critical plan holders with strict governance requirements, we recommend using SCIM provisioning to manage user accounts with ease and enforce higher password requirements.

👍 New to role-based access control? Click here to learn more. 

Promote a data-driven culture

Your last step in these first 30 days should focus on democratizing data within your organization. 

If you haven’t already, it’s time to develop user-friendly dashboards, reports and visualizations to empower non-technical users to explore and derive insights from your data. Share them with your teams and present new reporting regularly on team meetings.

Here are a few examples of how Fivetran promotes data literacy and awareness internally:

Tip 1: Announce new reports on public channels: Fivetran has an analytics announcement channel, where we regularly post about new data, dashboards and reports (and celebrate each other! 🎉)

Tip 2: Do lightweight training: Present new data to impacted teams. For example, Fivetran analysts present and demo any new marketing dashboards during our bi-weekly marketing meetings.

Tip 3: Make dashboard reviews a ritual: We review key company ORKs and dashboards on every all-hands meeting. Not only does this drive awareness, it helps listeners with varying degrees of data literacy understand how to read new reports.

Next steps

Congratulations! By completing this guide, you’ve built a solid foundation for efficient data movement, transformation and democratization within your organization. Now it’s time to think about questions like: how is this data providing value? How is our business changing? Remember, continuous improvement is key, so regularly review your implementation plan and priorities so you can adapt to changing business needs.

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