How Looker works

Looker is a powerful and intuitive business intelligence platform, but it’s up to you to input the right data in the right format in order for it to be useful. Looker accepts structured data from a wide variety of inputs, including from analytic data warehouses such as AWS Redshift. To connect to Looker with a SQL data warehouse, you will need some information about the server that hosts the database you want to connect to, the database name, credentials, and any security or permissions flags.

Looker gives you the option of having your instance hosted by Looker, or hosting the instance yourself. If you want to host your Looker instance on your own equipment or cloud service, you'll need to follow these general steps:

Install Looker - Add Looker to your server and ensure your server is setup properly to be secure, communicate with Looker services, collect troubleshooting information, and have backups.

Enable Secure Database Access - If necessary, choose and implement a way for Looker to communicate with your data in a secure manner.

Configure Your Database for Looker - Create the database user and password Looker will use to connect to your database, and enable persistent derived tables when possible.

Connect Looker to Your Database - Add your database information to Looker so that it can connect to your data.

Configure Looker Sign-in Options - Decide how users will login to your Looker instance and add those users.

Needless to say, installing Looker natively will require developer resources and time spent becoming familiar with Looker’s structured data requirements (as well as ongoing maintenance.)

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