Product Overview of Looker
Looker is a comprehensive enterprise platform for business intelligence (BI), data applications, and embedded analytics, now integrated into the Google Cloud ecosystem following its acquisition by Google in 2019.
What Looker Does
Looker is designed to help organizations access, explore, and derive actionable insights from their data in real-time. It serves as a centralized hub for data exploration, reporting, and collaboration, enabling businesses to make better-informed decisions. Looker integrates with multiple data sources, providing a unified view of an organization’s data across various clouds and systems.
Key Features and Functionality
Embedded Analytics
Looker allows for the seamless integration of analytics into existing applications and workflows. This feature transforms data into deeply integrated, value-driving experiences, enabling organizations to embed fully interactive dashboards into their products or customer-facing portals.
Data Modeling and Governance
Looker’s trusted modeling layer, powered by LookML (a SQL-based modeling language), provides a single place to curate and govern the metrics most important to the business. This ensures consistent and reliable results across all data interactions. LookML centrally defines and manages business rules and definitions, creating efficient SQL queries and removing technical barriers for users.
Real-Time and Governed Data
Looker delivers real-time, governed data experiences at scale. It ensures that users have access to a fresh, consistent, and governed view of their data, which is crucial for improving decision-making and productivity.
Self-Service Capabilities
Looker offers two primary tools for self-service analytics:
- Looker: Provides enterprise dashboards built on governed data, allowing users to perform repeatable analyses and drill down to row-level detail.
- Looker Studio: A free, interactive, and collaborative platform for ad-hoc reports and dashboards. It supports over 800 data sources and allows users to perform analysis on both governed and unmodeled data. Looker Studio is particularly useful for creating visually appealing reports and dynamic visualizations.
AI Integration and Automation
Looker integrates with Google’s AI capabilities, including Vertex AI, to enable powerful custom AI workflows and advanced analytics. The platform also features an AI assistant that accelerates analytical workflows by automating tasks such as visualization creation, formula creation, and data modeling.
Collaboration and Sharing
Looker fosters a collaborative environment by allowing users to create and share interactive dashboards, reports, and visualizations. This facilitates cross-functional data exploration and knowledge sharing, enhancing transparency and alignment among different stakeholders.
Scalability and Security
Looker is designed to scale with the business, offering various plans such as Standard, Enterprise, and Embed, each tailored to different use cases and user needs. It also ensures data security, particularly important for data monetization and compliance with security audits.
API and Customization
The platform provides robust API coverage, allowing users to customize and extend Looker’s functionality through API calls. This unlocks limitless possibilities for creating data experiences beyond traditional Looker dashboards.
In summary, Looker is a powerful BI and analytics platform that combines advanced data modeling, real-time insights, embedded analytics, and AI-driven automation to help organizations derive maximum value from their data. Its integration with Google Cloud and other Google services further enhances its capabilities and scalability.