How to Migrate from Chartio to Rakam

If you haven’t seen the announcement, Chartio is shutting down on March 1, 2022. It might be frustrating news for those who have been using Chartio for a long time as their BI or analytics solution. You might be wondering what you’ll do now. Don’t worry, we got you covered. Here we will tell you step by step how to migrate all your charts, reports, and datasets into Rakam and start using Rakam for free.

Rakam has native integration with dbt, an open-source data modeling language. It’s also a suggested solution by Chartio and being used by many Chartio customers already. Since Rakam already supports dbt, you can export your Chartio data models to dbt which can be used in Rakam by integrating your dbt repository. You can later iterate on your models and your changes get source controlled in a Git repository.

For the dashboards & reports in Chartio, once you remove all the dashboards that are not active, you can export them as code via Admin API and create dashboard files inside dbt’s analysis/directory using our dashboard schema defined here. Since Rakam is a code-first analytics tool, you don’t need to create each dashboard using the interface. That would be painful and slow. Instead, you can define your dashboards as code.

If you are in the process of moving your Chartio dashboards to Rakam, we can also help you migrate in an easy way using scripts to create dashboard files in your dbt projects. Feel free to contact us or schedule a call if you need any help or just would like to know how Rakam works in general.

Before we get started, here is some information about Rakam:

Rakam is a modern BI solution that works on top of your data warehouse without pulling or duplicating any of your data. We provide you with a simple UI that enables everyone in your organization to ask questions and get insights from your data without the need of writing SQL. Rakam has special features for behavioral analysis such as Segmentation, Funnel and Retention so your teams can analyze the product(customer) data seamlessly and understand how your product is being used better. When the end-users ask questions about your data using these features, Rakam compiles those questions into SQL queries under the hood and runs them on your data warehouse in an efficient way.

In the modeling layer, Rakam leverages dbt’s schema.yml files. So if you’re already using dbt, you don’t need to model your data again for Rakam like other BI tools require you to, instead, you can just connect your GIT repository and sync your dbt models.

So let’s get started:

1-) Use the Dashboard Cleanup feature to archive unused/unnecessary dashboards in your Chartio account.

2-) Migrate your data models from Chartio to dbt.

3-) Sign up on Rakam and connect your Rakam account to your GIT repository. So you can leverage the models in your dbt.

4-) Chartio has an Admin API that lets you export the dashboard but unfortunately, the dashboard items don’t seem to be listed in the API. What you can do is to create your dashboards as code in Rakam by copying the Chartio dashboards that are important to you.

5-) Done! You’ve successfully migrated from Chartio to Rakam.

If you need any help or would like to chat with the Rakam team before you get started, you can either schedule a call or send us a message.