Integrating Sigma Dashboards with Drupal 11
Sigma represents the next generation of business intelligence and analytics platforms. Designed to democratize data analysis for organizations of all sizes, it provides a familiar, spreadsheet-like interface that empowers you to explore and analyze cloud data without specialized coding skills or extensive technical training. If you can use Excel, you can leverage Sigma's powerful analytics capabilities.
The platform's cloud-native architecture connects directly to leading cloud data platforms, including Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, and Google Cloud, enabling you to analyze billions of rows of data in seconds while maintaining enterprise-grade security and performance. This direct connection eliminates the need for data movement or duplication, ensuring you can always perform analysis on the most current data available.
Sigma makes it easy to create dynamic dashboards with powerful, interactive visualizations that update instantly as data changes. This empowers you to make faster, data-driven decisions across your organization. You can also maintain a high degree of control over who can access Sigma dashboards to view data and reports, and even make them available to your customers.
Based on all these useful features and functionality, wouldn’t it be great to embed those dashboards securely in your website? I’ll explain how you can do it with Drupal, and why Drupal 11 is the perfect platform to integrate with Sigma.
Why Drupal 11 Makes an Ideal Integration Platform
Drupal 11 serves as an exceptional foundation for integrating Sigma dashboards. Its robust user management system provides granular control over access permissions, allowing precise control over who can view dashboards and datasets. The platform's flexible content management capabilities enable you to create sophisticated user interfaces that contextually present different analytics views based on user roles, client relationships, or business requirements, all within the robust content editing tools that Drupal provides.
Drupal’s built-in caching mechanisms ensure that dashboard integrations perform optimally, and its simple administrative screens allow you to configure dashboard embedding without code or technical expertise.
For a recent ask, we had to provide the following for a client:
- Multiple embedded dashboards in Drupal
- A “/dashboard” route to display the dashboard that a user has access to
- A login flow for clients in Drupal that authenticates and puts them on the /dashboard page when logged in
- Methods to update user accounts and dictate what dashboards they have access to
- Ways to update API parameters without using code to change the Sigma integration site-wide on the fly
Drupal and Sigma Dashboard Integration
First, we created a foundation for a custom Drupal module that allowed various configuration settings, provided a vanity route of “/dashboard,” and contained the logic to interact with Sigma over an HTTP API.
Architecture and Security
The integration implements Sigma's secure embed functionality using HMAC-SHA256 signature generation to ensure that all dashboard requests are authenticated and tamper-proof. The controller that powers the /dashboard route generates time-limited, signed URLs that include user-specific parameters such as account type, client schema identifiers, and session duration. This approach maintains the highest security standards by ensuring users can only access data appropriate to their role and organization. It also ensures that Sigma row-level security is implemented and adhered to properly.
Flexible Dashboard Assignment
The module supports two primary dashboard embedding capabilities. For standard implementations, administrators can configure a global dashboard URL that serves as the default view for all users. The system also supports per-user custom dashboards through a field on the user account in Drupal. When enabled for a specific user, the system uses their individual “dashboard URL” instead of the one in global configuration, so you can offer highly personalized experiences per user.
Multi-Tenant Data Isolation
A key feature of the integration is its support for multi-tenant environments through a schema attribute configuration. This field allows the system to dynamically inject client-specific schema identifiers into the Sigma embed URL, ensuring that users only see data relevant to their organization. The module constructs user attributes dynamically, passing the client schema name as a custom attribute that Sigma can use for data filtering and access control.
Administrative Control and Configuration
Site administrators benefit from a comprehensive settings interface that centralizes all integration parameters. The configuration form allows administrators to:
- Set the base Sigma embed URL for global dashboards
- Configure team names and client schema attribute mappings
- Manage embed client IDs and secrets for secure authentication
- Toggle wide-mode display options for enhanced dashboard presentation
- Control session lengths and security parameters
- Update configuration without requiring code changes or deployments
Extensibility and Maintenance
The modular design makes it straightforward to extend functionality, add new user fields, or integrate additional Sigma features as business requirements evolve.
This integration demonstrates how you can leverage Drupal 11's flexible architecture to create sophisticated, secure, and user-friendly analytics portals that bring the power of Sigma directly into familiar content management workflows. Doing this provides your organization with seamless access to its critical business intelligence data.
From this point, you could embed Sigma in numerous ways in Drupal, whether it's Layout Builder, Acquia Site Studio, or Experience Builder, while providing the simplest possible way for your content editors to drag and drop dashboards into regular content pages.
Start Embedding Smarter Analytics Today
Integrating Sigma dashboards with Drupal 11 combines the best of modern business intelligence and enterprise-grade content management. With Sigma’s powerful, secure analytics and Drupal 11’s flexible, user-centric architecture, your organization can deliver personalized, real-time insights directly within its digital experiences, without compromising on performance or security.
At Velir, we specialize in building tailored, scalable solutions that connect the dots between data and digital strategy. Whether you're looking to empower your users with embedded dashboards, streamline multi-tenant analytics, or enhance your editors' content-building workflows, we can help you get there.
Ready to bring your data to life with Drupal and Sigma? Get in touch to see how we can help you integrate them.