Connecting to Looker Studio

With the Looker connector in Looker Studio, you can create a data source that lets you view and analyze data from a Looker Explore within Looker Studio.

Looker users who are less familiar with using Looker Studio may want to refer to the Looker and Looker Studio shared terms and concepts documentation page for more information about the nuances between similar terms and concepts in Looker and Looker Studio.

Before you begin

A Looker data source in Looker Studio must be an Explore from a Looker instance that meets the requirements, which are listed on the Looker connector requirements, limits, feature support, and troubleshooting documentation page.

Only a Looker admin can enable the Looker connector for a Looker instance.

To interact with a Looker data source in Looker Studio, users must meet the permissions and roles requirements listed on the Overview of Looker connector permissions documentation page.

Enabling and using the connector

To enable the connector, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to the BI Connectors page in the Platform section of the Looker Admin panel.
  2. Either enable the All Looker BI Connectors setting or the Looker Studio setting. In Looker (Google Cloud core) instances, these settings are enabled by default.

Disabling the connector

To disable the connector, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to the BI Connectors page in the Platform section of the Looker Admin panel.
  2. Either disable the All Looker BI Connectors setting or the Looker Studio setting.

Monitoring the Looker connector for Looker Studio

A Looker admin can view Looker Studio usage by using the Query API Client Properties group of fields in the System Activity History Explore. An entry is created in the History Explore every time a new query is run.

In the Query API Client Properties dimension group under the History view, the following fields are relevant to Looker Studio:

  • API Client Name — This field will always show Looker Studio to identify Looker Studio entries.
  • Looker Studio Dashboard ID — This field shows the ID of the Looker Studio report that issued the query.
  • Looker Studio Datasource ID — This field shows the ID of the data source in Looker Studio that is being queried.

The following example shows a System Activity URL that indicates Looker Studio usage. Replace <instance_name.looker.com> with your instance URL.

https://<instance_name.looker.com>/explore/system__activity/history?fields=query_api_client_context.name,query_api_client_context.ls_dashboard_id,query_api_client_context.ls_datasource_id,user.name,history.created_date,history.created_time_of_day&f[query_api_client_context.name]=looker%20studio&sorts=history.created_time_of_day+desc&limit=5000

What's next

After you have enabled the connector, Explores in the Looker instance are available to use as data sources in Looker Studio.

See the Connect to Looker documentation page for information about using the Looker connector to add a Looker Explore as a data source in a Looker Studio report.

Additional resources