This QuickStart introduces the essential administrative features and considerations within Sigma. Whether you're managing your instance, setting up connections, configuring data governance rules, or customizing user interactions, this will provide you with a foundational overview.
Target Audience
Administrators (admin) who are new to Sigma and want a quick overview of the available features common to their role.
Prerequisites
- A computer with a current browser. It does not matter which browser you want to use.
- Access to your Sigma environment.
- Some familiarity with Sigma is assumed. Not all steps will be shown as the basics are assumed to be understood.
What You'll Learn
How to leverage the available administrative functions in Sigma to get things done efficiently and effectively.
We will first cover how to access the administrative ("admin") areas of Sigma, and then list and describe each of the available options.
Admin users can access the admin page one of two ways as shown:
We have centralized all the admin options on this one page as shown:
In addition to Live chat, there are many other options exposed by clicking on the 
icon:
- Documentation: Explore Sigma's self-service resource library for documentation.
- Try a tutorial: Access commonly used features via in-product tutorials.
- Sigma QuickStarts: Step-by-step tutorials for learning Sigma's features and fundamentals.
- Sigma community: Interact with other Sigma users, share knowledge, and get answers.
- Keyboard shortcuts: Learn shortcuts for efficient navigation and actions.
- Function index: Browse all Sigma functions with explanations and examples.
- What's new: Stay updated on new feature releases in weekly release notes.
In addition, Sigma publishes new feature announcements in QuickStart format, once per month.
Next, we will cover each area inside administration, at a high-level.
Navigate to Administration > Account > General Settings:
General Setting provides additional control of:
- Site
- Custom Home Pages
- Account Timezone
- Localization
- Various Other Features
- Integrations
- Embedding
- Custom Plugins
- Custom Functions
Site
Site identifies your user account name, cloud provider, data of creation, URL and when the product license will expire.
Admin users are able to edit Organization Name and Company Login URL values by clicking the Edit button.
Custom Home Pages
Sigma Admins can Enable this feature, and designate a workbook to use as a custom homepage for an organization or team. The first page of the workbook becomes the custom homepage.
A custom homepage functions as a landing page for its viewers..
For example, embedding specific visualizations along with buttons linking to the fundamental QuickStarts:
Time
Allows portal-wide timezone preference setting. The default is UTC.
Locale
Account Locale
Allows portal-wide timezone preference for base local for all documents. This may be changed.
Organization Translations
Organization translations are centrally managed translation files that translate commonly-used terms across all workbooks. As a result, workbook owners do not need to translate those common terms in each individual workbook.
Features
This is a grouping of small features that do not necessitate their own group. Each feature can be enabled/disabled using the slide control.
CSV upload:
Enable CSV upload for connections with write access configured.
Sample connection:
Include Sigma's sample connection in list of connections to select from.
Public embeds:
Allow public embedding of Sigma documents.
License upgrade request:
Allow users to request a license with more permission from admin (e.g. from Lite to Essentials).
Comments:
Allow commenting on Sigma documents.
Annotations:
Capture elements as images to annotate as comments in Sigma documents. Captured images will be stored in a Sigma managed cloud for a period of your choosing. The default is for 3 months.
Integrations
Sigma supports integrations with Slack and dbt.
Embedding
For customers who want to include (embed) Sigma content into their own applications, Sigma provides a secure embedding method.
There is a QuickStart series for those wanting detailed information and instruction.
Audit Logging
When Audit Logs are enabled for your organization, an additional Snowflake connection will appear to administrative users. This connection provides read access to data related to user-initiated events that occur within your Sigma organization.
Sigma also provides a pre-built dashboard (Usage Dashboard) that customers get access to for free. It provides comprehensive information on how Sigma is being used. Information on that is here.
There is a QuickStart on audit logging basics
Sigma Audit Logs
Sigma provides an extensive log of user activity in the audit database. In addition, we also log all emails sent and support chats with Sigma, for your convenience:
Create an Audit Logs Storage Integration
Some customers prefer to save export logs in their own cloud. Sigma supports these providers:
Custom Plugins
Sigma supports plugin elements in workbooks. Plugins are third-party applications built to add additional functionality into Sigma.
There is a QuickStart that covers this topic here
Custom Functions
Admins can define custom functions to represent frequently used complex calculations that combine logic, aggregates, and other type of operations. There are many advantages to adding custom functions to your Sigma practice:
- Use custom functions to encode business logic instead of repeating it.
- Encapsulate complex calculations that are common business use cases, for easier use.
- Expose your proprietary warehouse functions, making them consumable
Brand settings are the next tab over, in Account Settings, and provides a way to customize Sigma towards your organizations fonts, color themes and email content.
Custom Fonts
Sigma supports custom fonts for workbooks, worksheet visualizations, and dashboards.
Custom fonts can be uploaded at the organization level and used on any workbooks, worksheet visualizations, and dashboards in that organization.
Organizations are not limited to one custom font.
Accepted formats: .ttf, .otf, .woff, .woff2
For example, we can easily add a new font, "Coffee House" in this case:
Workbook Themes
Sigma supports creation of workbook themes. Admin can customize sets of colors, fonts, spacing, and more.
For example, we can easily add a new theme and set it as the Organizations Default so that it is the first choice for all content:
There are many options in the image above, some of them grouped (#3 in the image above).
Customize Email
Custom email branding allows you to apply your company's brand to all export emails sent from your Sigma organization.
By default, all emails include Sigma branding. However, applying any subset of custom branding options will automatically remove all Sigma branding.
For example, a custom email configuration might look like this:
There is also an option to send a test email to yourself. Results will be similar to this:
Custom SMTP Server
Custom SMTP Server allows you to send Sigma emails from your own SMTP server. Sigma generated emails will be sent from an email address from within your domain.
Sigma supports multiple authentication methods including:
- Password: Sigma prompts new organization members to create a unique password for their Sigma account and login.
- SAML or Password: Organization members authenticate with either SSO or a unique password.
- SAML: Sigma authenticates organization member accounts through the Single Sign-On (SSO) protocol you provide.
- OAuth or Password: Sigma authenticates organization member accounts through OAuth Single Sign-On (SSO) or a unique password. This option supports OAuth with Snowflake.
- OAuth: Sigma authenticates organization member accounts through OAuth Single Sign On (SSO). This option supports OAuth with Snowflake.
Sigma supports Snowflake Key-pair Authorization and there is a QuickStart on how to use that.
Authentication Methods & Options:
All configuration is accessed by clicking the Edit button.
The current values for Guest Account and 2-Factor Authentication are shown on the main page for your convenience.
In the example below, we are allowing SAML or a Sigma password to be used to log in.
Guest Access
Guest Access is enabled (off by default). Guest user accounts are recommended when working with external vendors.
Guest users cannot view or request access to content outside of their Admin-assigned team(s).
This feature is opt-in and must be enabled by an organization admin before guest users can be invited to your organization.
2-Factor Authentication
Sigma supports 2-factor authentication.
Learn more about 2-Factor authentication with Sigma.
Identity provider login URL
In the screenshot, there is an example Identity provider login URL. In this case, the url was provided by Okta, but any IdP provider can be used.
Okta also provided the X509 certificate as well.
There is a QuickStart covering Single Sign-On with Sigma and Okta
Company Domain Sign-up
When you use the Password authentication method, you can also select if you would like to add any domains to the allowlist. By default, new users can only sign up through an invite.
Adding your company's email domain allows anyone with a company email to create a Sigma account without a personalized invite.
Sigma prompts new users to enter their email from a domain on the allowlist. After confirming the email, the user can register as a Sigma user.
Export Authentication:
Authorized Domains
Sigma Admins may choose to control which domains can receive emails, Google Sheets or Google Drive exports from Sigma.
If no domains are declared authorized, users can export reports to any email address.
The Connections page provides configuration information so that Sigma is able to connect to your cloud data warehouse.
For new Sigma customers (and trial accounts) there will only be the Sigma Sample Database at first. Administrators can Create Connection to configure additional connections:
At the time of this QuickStart, seven vendors are supported.
Clicking on the desired icon will bring up the configuration dialogue specific to that vendor:
Whitelisting Sigma
Depending on the security parameters of your organization, it may be necessary to add Sigma's IP addresses to your allowed list of IPs (whitelist).
Sigma's egress IP addresses are listed on all individual connection pages in your Sigma Admin Portal:
For example, selecting Snowflake displays the egress IP addresses:
Write-Back
Another important configuration is warehouse write-back access. This is only required for specific Sigma features. If you are not using these features, it is not required.
Granting write-back to a database enables the use of several Sigma features:
CSV upload
Materialization
Dataset warehouse views
Input Tables
By the way; Sigma input tables are a game-changer, and if you have not seen why, check out this QuickStart.
Sigma Sample Database
Sigma provides a set of sample data, at no cost, to all customers. The sample database is a great way to let new users become familiar with Sigma, without having to connect to corporate data. The connection is not editable and it can be hidden if desired.
Sigma provides all customers with extensive reporting on various aspects of user activity. All the reports are built using Sigma and are provided at no-cost to customers. Admins can use this area to get a quick visibility to important KPIs but also leverage Sigmas "drill anywhere" capability to get to the lowest level of detail required.
To learn more about external logging, please review this QuickStart
At the time of this QuickStart, the following usage catagories are provided. Each category has many KPI, charts, tables and filters, formatted based on the available data.
Users:
Explore user status, activity and licensing. Filter by date range and/or query text.
Document Activity:
Discover your organization's most commonly used documents and your top documents users. Filter by date range, Top N, and the number of days since the dashboards were last opened. These insights can assist organizations to audit unused documents and identify documents that drive the most user engagement.
Document Permissions:
Discover who has permissions for a document, the origin of the permissions, access ype, and who granted permission. These insights can help organizations to improvevsecurity.
Scheduled Exports:
View data on your organization's export tasks and Sendgrid email events.
Materializations:
Metrics and status of materialization runs with run-times.
Query Summary:
View a summary of your queries. Available data includes total queries run, queries over 10s, median query time, average query duration, queries by user type, query status, and timeouts. Filter by date range and/or query text.
Embedding:
View application embedding usage for your organization. Private and Public embeds are not tracked. Each embed URL must include an external_user_id for tracking purposes.
In Sigma, users are called People.
People can be added manually to Sigma using the Administration > People interface. This interface also supports adding multiple people at a time (bulk loading).
When added manually, people receive an email invitation. Once invited, their Sigma account is listed on the Pending Invitations section of the People page.
Email invitations and welcome emails can be customized if desired.
People can be added automatically the first time they login to Sigma using an IDP, or when using Sigma embedded into another application.
Sigma's REST API also supports adding new people. The API Reference is here.
There are also API code samples ("recipes") here, demonstrating common API operations.
There is a QuickStart that covers API Recipes here
The People page has a filter that is a convienent way to see only the catagories of people you are interested in:
People in Sigma can be deactivated:
After you click Deactivate, the user's documents are automatically migrated to the selected persons's My Documents folder. The deactivated user's documents will be located in My Documents > Archived Users > Folder (folder title is the deactivated user's name).
There is no need to manually transfer all the worksheets/dashboards created by the user; Sigma does this for you.
Documentation Link for Deactivation
Sigma uses teams to organize and manage users in groups.
You can use Sigma to manage user group membership or leverage your organizations Identity Provider (IdP).
Manage Users and Teams with SCIM
Teams can be Public or Private.
Public teams are seen and searchable by all members of your Sigma org. Anyone will be able to share documents with public teams.
Private teams will only be visible to members of the team.
For example, in this "Finance Team" there are four users, two accessed Sigma via an embedded application and another logged into Sigma directly. The last user is an admin.
When creating a new team, you are prompted to also create a new workspace (optional). You can use workspaces help organize content, to categorize and share folders and documents. Workspaces can be shared with other users and teams using permission grants.
Account Types allow different users different rights and are part of Sigma's RBAC (role-based access control) system.
A user's account type determines their highest level of interaction with data and content in Sigma.
Each user is assigned a single account type; they can only be assigned one account type at any time.
Sigma provides four default account types:
Sigma also supports custom account types. These provide a way to restrict users to specific Sigma functionality.
For example, a No-Export role that does not allow exporting data would look like this, based on the Essential license:
User Attributes can be used to provide a customized experience for your Sigma teams, people, or embedded users.
For example, they can be assigned as a function in a dataset/data-model to provide row-level security.
There are QuickStarts that cover row level security:
Implementing Row Level Security
Embedding 06: Row Level Security
Once you create and assign a user attribute to teams, you can use this functionality in a dataset to enforce row-level security using the function CurrentUserAttributeText in a formula.
For example, if we want to restrict a user Finance TestUser to only the rows that are in the East region, we create a user attribute like this:
Then we use a formula on a dataset (that has a column called "Store Region") like this:
Contains(CurrentUserAttributeText("Region"), [Store Region])
The user would not be aware of the restriction and the data would be limited to the East region rows automatically.
Documentation Link for Embedded Scenarios
The Embeds page lists all of the workbooks or dashboards that are active.
It is common when using Sigma to embed content into another application, that many "embeds" are created.
This page provides a simple way to manage them all in one place.
It also alerts if there are basic configuration issues with an embed.
For example, number three shows the alert symbol, indicating that the workbook no longer exists, although the embed configuration still does. We are able to either Reassign embed or simply delete it:
For those interested in embedding, there is an entire series of QuickStarts dedicated to getting you going.
Version tagging allows you to employ a software development lifecycle (SDLC) to control workbook versions, using tags.
For example, Sigma can have a Development, Staging, and Production versions of a workbook, and migrate changes as needed.
This allows you to control which workbook versions are available to specific users, during the development lifecycle.
For example, when a workbook is assigned the Quality_Assurance tag (in the image below), only the Quality_Assurance has access to it for testing:
Once testing is complete, a member of that team might tag the workbook as Production, so that end-users can access it.
All documents that are tagged will appear in the corresponding tag page:
There are QuickStarts that cover tagging:
The scheduled exports page shows a summary of all exports that have been set to run a schedule; across all users.
Admin are able to filter this list and delete scheduled jobs.
Sigma also provides extensive reporting on scheduled report usage:
The OpenAI integration allows Sigma to leverage OpenAI language models (including GPT-4 and embedding models) for features like AI-generated columns in input tables, visualization explanations, and formula AI capabilities.
You can integrate with OpenAI directly or through Azure OpenAI Service.
The Materializations page summarizes all schedule materialization jobs, last run date, next run date, status, running time and when the data was last used.
This can be very useful to admin wanting to ensure that jobs are not only running properly, but also that the result sets are being used. There is no value (but is some cost!) in materializing data that is not being used by the business.
Sigma also provides an option to pause jobs that are not being used as shown (number three):
Admin are able to jump directly to the object being materialized, or perform other functions as shown:
The Warehouse Views page summarizes all views, their status, when they were created, last updated and the owner.
Warehouse views are virtual tables in Snowflake that can be queried using Sigma or any other application in your data ecosystem. Instead of storing data in a Snowflake database table, a view saves a SQL statement that expresses specific query logic defined by the data element or input table in Sigma.
When a warehouse view is created, a live link is established between Snowflake and Sigma. The view references the data element (or input table) as the source of truth and automatically updates to reflect the most recent version of the element's underlying data. Warehouse views can be especially useful to present the data in a way that's optimized for analysis, without altering the base tables.
Developer Access provides a way to create client credentials for programmatic access to Sigma.
It supports the generation of client credentials for Sigma's REST API or for embedded applications.
The choice is made after clicking Create New:
The page lists all client credentials and provides a way to revoke them:
To learn how to access Sigma via API, there is a QuickStart
There is also an API Reference
There are API code samples available with a corresponding QuickStart
To learn how to access Sigma via embedding, there is a QuickStart series
In this QuickStart we provided a very high-level overview of all the administrative features of the Sigma platform. Please be sure to check out the additional resources list below.
Additional Resource Links
Help Center Home
Sigma Community
Sigma Blog
Be sure to check out all the latest developments at Sigma's First Friday Feature page!
