Connecting to Looker Studio

The Looker connector in Looker Studio allows you to access data from Looker Explores within Looker Studio by adding an Explore as a data source in a Looker Studio report.

You can read about using the connector in Looker Studio in the Connect to Looker article in the Looker Studio help center.

Enabling and using the connector

Your Looker instance must meet the following prerequisites before you can enable the connector:

  • Your Looker instance must be Looker-hosted.
  • Your Looker instance must be running Looker 22.16 or later. Instances earlier than Looker 23.4 must be hosted in the Google Cloud. As of Looker 23.6, Looker (Google Cloud core) is supported for the connector.
  • If your Looker instance has the Enable Allowlist switch enabled, you will need to allowlist the IP addresses that are used by Looker Studio — contact Support to provide the full list of IP addresses.

Before the connector can be used, the following prerequisites must be met:

  • In Looker (original), your Looker admin must enable either the Looker BI Connectors or the Looker Studio options on the BI Connectors panel in the Platform section of Looker's Admin menu. In Looker (Google Cloud core) instances, these options are enabled by default.
  • Each user who wants to connect a Looker Explore as a Looker Studio data source must have at least explore permissions for at least one model on the Looker instance.
  • Looker Studio users must have access_data and clear_cache_refresh Looker permissions to view Looker data in a Looker Studio report that is created from a Looker Explore data source.

Disabling the connector

A Looker admin can disable the Looker Studio connector toggle on the BI Connectors panel in the Platform section of Looker's Admin menu.

Connecting to Looker from Looker Studio

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

Monitoring the Looker connector for Looker Studio

A Looker admin can view Looker Studio usage 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, these are the fields 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.

Following is an example of a System Activity URL that shows 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