Before enabling System Activity on a customer-hosted Looker deployment with MySQL backend, verify that you have properly set up the user for the backend database. Specifically, you must perform the step to
grant all on looker_tmp.* to '<DB_username>'@'%';before enabling the System Activity feature. See the procedure on this documentation page.
If you have enabled the System Activity Model feature in Looker Labs, then Looker admins and users who have been granted the see_system_activity permission have access to Looker’s System Activity Explores:
The System Activity Explores connect to Looker’s underlying application database. They show information about your Looker instance, including Looks and dashboards saved on your instance, user information, 90 days of historical queries, and instance performance statistics. This data can be useful for monitoring and auditing purposes. The System Activity data is backed up daily, as discussed on the Backup documentation page.
Chat Team Tip: Time-based data in System Activity is stored in the Looker System time zone. See the Using Time Zone Settings documentation page for more information.
These are the System Activity Explores:
| Explore Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Content Usage | Data about Look and dashboard usage, including frequency of views, favoriting, scheduling, embedding, and access via the API. Also includes details about individual Looks and dashboards. |
| DB Connection | Details about database connections. Includes information about users who have access to the database connections. |
| Dashboard | Details about all dashboards and dashboard elements. Includes information about Looks, queries, roles, users, and folders associated with dashboards. |
| Dashboard Performance | Performance and historical data about dashboards. |
| Event | Information about historical events within Looker, including the name, type, and frequency of each event. Includes information about groups and users connected to the events. |
| Event Attribute | Information about the attributes that make up events. Includes the data in the Event Explore, and adds attribute information. |
| Field Usage | LookML fields and the number of times used. |
| Group | Listing of group and details about those groups, including parent and child groups, and roles and users that belong to each groups. |
| History | Details about all queries run in the previous 90 days. |
| Look | Details about all Looks. Includes information about dashboards, queries, users, and folders associated with Looks. |
| Merge Query | Information about merged queries, including fields and other elements of both the source and merged queries. |
| PDT Builds | Details about PDT builds, including time taken to finish builds, and the connection and model the PDTs are part of. |
| PDT Event Log | Information about historical events related to PDTs, including PDT rebuilds and errors. |
| Result Maker Lookup | Information about merged queries, including fields and other elements of the queries from both the source queries, as well as details about the resulting merged query. |
| Role | Looker roles and the model and permissions sets that make up the roles. |
| SQL Query | SQL queries run, including how recently and frequently, and details about users who have run them. |
| Scheduled Plan | Information about all scheduled data deliveries, including both previously scheduled jobs and currently scheduled jobs. Includes data about the dashboards, Looks, queries, folders, and users associated with scheduled data deliveries. |
| Space | Information about all folders, the content stored in each folder, and the users who have access to each folder. |
| User | Details about each user, including historical queries run, and the content and folders to which they have access. |