Looker

Looker is Google Cloud's business intelligence platform built on the LookML semantic model, for data teams and software vendors embedding analytics.

Looker gives a company one place to define what its numbers mean, so every dashboard, embedded chart and question draws on the same definitions. It has been owned by Google since 2020, when Google acquired Looker Data Sciences, and it now runs as part of Google Cloud under its own name. Data teams describe their tables, joins and measures once, and the rest of the business works from that shared model. Queries go straight to the database or warehouse where the data already lives. The model is written in LookML, which Developer users edit and keep in Git, moving changes from a development branch to production. Explores let other users pick fields and filters to build a query, and SQL Runner sends SQL directly to the database. User-defined dashboards hold tiles that can be moved and resized freely, and any figure can be drilled down to the rows behind it. The visualization library covers the usual charts and maps, and the Chart Config Editor adds treemap, Sankey and sunburst types. Conversational Analytics, powered by Gemini, answers plain-language questions within a chosen Explore or data agent. Looker suits companies whose data sits in BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift or Databricks and who want metrics governed by a data team rather than rebuilt in each report. Software vendors use it to put analytics inside their own products, with signed or cookieless embedding and row-level segmentation by user attribute. Organizations that show dashboards to clients can apply custom themes and private labeling. People who only read and filter reports work as Viewer users, while Developer users maintain the model. Companies buy it through Google Cloud's sales team. A common job is keeping one definition of revenue or active customers behind every view of it. The same governed figure then reaches executives through the Schedule delivery menu, which emails dashboards on a recurring timetable. On Google Cloud, lineage in Knowledge Catalog traces a path from BigQuery tables through LookML to the dashboards that depend on them. Persistent derived tables rebuild on the schedule a datagroup sets or when the source data changes. Away from a desk, people open Looks and dashboards in the iOS and Android app. Looker fits a company that wants an analyst, an executive and a customer inside an app to see the same number for the same question.