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 Platform after being acquired by Google in 2019.
What Looker Does
Looker enables organizations to access, explore, and derive actionable insights from their data in real-time. It serves as a centralized hub for data exploration, reporting, and collaboration, making business data accessible and useful across the entire organization. Looker helps in building insight-powered workflows and applications, improving decision-making, productivity, and innovation by delivering more insights to more users.
Key Features and Functionality
Intuitive Data Exploration
Looker offers a user-friendly interface that allows users to explore data visually and interactively. The drag-and-drop functionality simplifies complex analyses, enabling non-technical users to derive insights without heavy reliance on IT teams.
Collaborative Environment
Looker fosters collaboration among teams through shared data experiences. Users can create and share interactive dashboards, reports, and visualizations, enhancing transparency and aligning efforts based on data insights.
Embedded Analytics
Looker seamlessly integrates analytics into existing workflows and applications, allowing organizations to embed analytics directly into their products or customer-facing portals. This feature enhances the user experience and provides real-time insights to customers and partners.
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 trustworthy results across all data consumption points. LookML centrally defines and manages business rules and definitions, creating efficient SQL queries and removing technical skills as a barrier.
Looker Studio Integration
Looker Studio, which replaced Google Data Studio, allows for interactive, collaborative, and ad-hoc reports and dashboards. It supports over 800 data sources and offers a flexible drag-and-drop canvas for creating customized reports. Users can perform ad-hoc analysis on both governed and unmodeled data, and the platform integrates with Looker’s semantic model for comprehensive data analysis.
AI and Automation
Looker leverages Google’s AI capabilities, including integration with Vertex AI, to enable powerful custom AI workflows and advanced analytics. An AI assistant helps accelerate analytical workflows, such as visualization creation, formula creation, and data modeling, all underpinned by robust semantic and Gemini foundational models.
Scalability and Security
Looker is designed to scale with the business, offering various plans (Standard, Enterprise, and Embed) that cater to different user needs and provide enhanced security features. It ensures data security and compliance, particularly important for data monetization and external analytics deployments.
User Licensing and Access
Looker provides different user roles, including standard users and developer users, each with access to various interfaces such as administration, LookML models, dashboards, and API interfaces. This flexible licensing model supports a range of internal BI and analytics use cases.
Use Cases
- Data Monetization: Looker is ideal for creating tailored data products, embedding analytics seamlessly, and scaling with the business while maintaining data security.
- Workspace Analytics: The Looker Block for Workspace helps in understanding the usage of productivity and collaboration tools like Google Workspace, providing modeled schemas and out-of-the-box dashboards for security audits and adoption analysis.
- General BI: Looker simplifies the creation of reports and dashboards, avoids stale data, and leverages prebuilt integrations to deliver fast, proactive insights embedded in the places where users work.
In summary, Looker is a powerful BI and analytics platform that combines intuitive data exploration, robust data modeling, embedded analytics, and AI-driven insights to help organizations make better business decisions and drive innovation.