How to Connect an AWS RDS DB Instance to Google Data Studio

This article aims to guide you in connecting your AWS MySQL DB instances to Google Data Studio.

Google data studio is a great tool for someone who wants to visualize some data on a free-to-use platform. Connecting to an RDS DB instance can be tricky but we’ll walk you through the process in this article. Before we get started make sure your VPC environment is configured to allow this kind of traffic to your DB instance.

First you’ll need to be logged into your google account and make your way to the Google Data Studio page here: https://datastudio.google.com.

Now we’re going to press the “Create” button on the left and select “Data Source” from the drop down menu. On this page we can select from an array of different connectors. In the search tab, find the “MySQL” connector and select it.

This will bring you to a page where you can enter your connection details and your password. To connect we’ll need to grab the endpoint of your instance from your AWS account. Head over to AWS RDS and click on the database you’re connecting to. Under the “Endpoint and Port” tab you’ll see a URL for the endpoint of this this instance. Copy it, go back to Google Data Studio and paste it in the form on the “Host Name or IP” line.

Next on the form you’ll need to type in the name of the database (remember this is not the name of the instance but of the database itself). Type in your credentials and you should be ready to connect to your instance. Click “Authenticate” to begin the connection. Click on the tables you’d like to bring into Google Data Studio and click “Connect” at the top left.

From here you’ll be able to clean up your data and add table calculations if necessary. Once you’re ready you can click “Explore” and “Report” on the top right of the screen to start using the visualization tools.

Hopefully this article helped guide you through a Google Data Studio connection or just gave you a new tool to use with RDS. This same method of connection should also translate well to most MySQL connectors and software.