Set up and administer Looker

Looker gives you the option of having your instance hosted by Looker or of hosting the instance yourself. During the setup process, a Looker Sales Engineer or Professional Services consultant will help you get set up.

There are also many settings that help you administer your Looker instance. These settings include options to customize Looker for your organization, configure authentication for users and groups, control user and group access to data and Looker features, and monitor Looker usage and health.

This page outlines the documentation on setting up and administering Looker.

Looker-hosted instances

The following pages help you install Looker-hosted instances:

Customer-hosted instances

The following pages help you install customer-hosted instances:

Setting up a database connection

The following pages help you understand how to connect to a database:

Administrative tutorials

The following pages teach you about a variety of administrative subjects:

Administrative panels

The following pages describe Looker's administration functions:

  • General pages — View a list of pages about setting system-wide options, enabling or disabling beta and legacy features, creating a custom help page for your users, setting a default homepage for your instance or for a user or group, and customizing the welcome emails new users receive.
  • System Activity pages — View information about the System Activity dashboards, which show user activity, content activity, and performance data for your Looker instance.
  • Users pages — View a list of pages about configuring users, groups, roles, and user attributes; managing user and group access to saved content; and viewing and resetting locked user accounts.
  • Database pages — View a list of pages about configured database connections, database query history, persistent derived tables, and datagroups.
  • Alerts & Schedules pages — View a list of pages about managing user alerts and schedules, viewing alert and schedule histories, specifying an emailed data policy, and monitoring data sent to external email addresses.
  • Platform pages — View a list of pages about setting system-wide options for integrated services, Looker's API, embedded content, email deliveries, and custom visualization types.
  • Authentication pages — View a list of pages about configuring authentication methods — including passwords, two-factor authentication, Google OAuth, LDAP, SAML, and OpenID Connect — and configuring options for user to stay logged in to Looker.
  • Server pages — View a list of pages about configuring Looker backups, configuring a list of IP addresses that can access your instance, viewing the internal Looker log, and viewing Looker usage information.

Security

The following page helps you understand Looker's security practices: