SPEAKER: In this month's session,
we're going to dive into how you can accelerate the deployment
and building of advanced analytics
and more complex data models with Looker.
The Looker Marketplace is a central location
for finding, deploying, and managing many types of Looker
content, such as Looker Blocks, applications, visualizations,
and plug-ins.
This overview covers how the Looker Marketplace reduces
your development time by utilizing a package management
framework to properly deploy, manage, and version control
content packages within Looker.
Enjoy.
JEAN NESSIER: Welcome to our presentation
on how to accelerate your use case with the Looker
Marketplace.
I'm Jean Nessier, Product Marketing Manager
for Looker Solutions.
ELENA ROWELL: And I'm Elena Rowell,
Outbound Product Manager for Looker Solutions
and Marketplace.
JEAN NESSIER: Our agenda today, we're
going to go over the Marketplace, what's
in it, why you should use it, how to use the Marketplace,
and then you'll see some updates, road maps, and more
information.
In the overview, we're going to go over
what content is available in the Marketplace,
as well as why you should use it.
The Looker Marketplace is a central location
for finding, deploying, and managing many types of Looker
content, such as Looker Blocks and applications,
visualizations and plug-ins, as well as
our partners, our system integrators,
who have built applications and Blocks.
It serves as a packaged management
system for all content deployment and installation.
There are three main types of content--
Looker Blocks, applications, and plug-ins.
Looker Blocks are prebuilt LookML models,
including dashboards and explorers for a variety
of popular data sources that you can leverage
to accelerate your analytics.
Looker Blocks can be the starting point
for quick and flexible analytics in Looker.
Looker applications are full-page, immersive
applications that offer tailored experiences within Looker,
taking advantage of the Looker Extension Framework
and further extending the value of the platform.
Plug-ins are visualization types that you can install and add
to Looker's native visualization library.
Looker Actions will be added to the Marketplace in 2022.
For those of you unfamiliar with Actions,
they make it easier than ever to build Looker into your day
to day workflow and maximize your impact.
For example, you can start conversations
in Slack, create customer lists and segment or in Marketo.
Actions simplify your workflow and allows you to quickly act
on data right from Looker.
So let's take a deeper look at Blocks.
Blocks help with two parts of the data modeling journey.
Blocks are an accelerator to help you get
a jumpstart on modeling data.
Additionally, Blocks represent incremental value
and add new analytics patterns.
Get the best practices and a jumpstart
into advanced analytics.
For example, there are Blocks that
are specific for optimizing your database
and there are Blocks for the Google Marketing
Platform for gaining deeper insights into customer
interactions.
Applications within the Looker Marketplace
include Looker's LookML Diagram extension, providing an entity
relationship diagram for the objects within your LookML
model.
There's also the Looker's data dictionary,
which provides a dedicated centralized interface
to search through all your Looker fields and descriptions.
And the Looker API Explorer provides
a useful and integrated experience
for exploring the methods and types of the Looker SDK.
And the third content with that is
within the Looker Marketplace are plug-ins or visualizations.
How do you want to see your data in looker?
Looker's data visualization software
makes it easy to detect changes and irregularities
within your data.
Visualizations help you bring your insights to life
by telling better, brighter stories with your data.
With dashboards that'll let you go deeper,
Looker's data visualizations and dashboards
are interactive and dynamic, giving you the flexibility
to drill down into your data while maintaining
a secure bird's eye view of operations.
And you have flexibility.
You can choose from your library for everything
from sunburst to stopwatches.
If you are looking for something even more specific,
you can build your own visualization,
and it can be added to Looker workflow.
So why use the Looker Marketplace?
You can accelerate new use cases.
You can leverage expert knowledge and modeling best
practices.
And you can scale by expanding functionality.
So how can you accelerate your use case
using the Looker Marketplace?
The data models act as a foundation for customization
and they provide common metrics and transformations.
As well, the Looker Block content is used
as out-of-the-box or can be a jumping-off point for more
customized dashboards.
And cross-industry specific visualizations
help to discover trends in your business and industry.
The quote here references the Major League Baseball.
And they were trying to reach a goal of democratizing
real-time data access to all its clubs
using their Wheelhouse data platform.
But their BI team didn't have the resources
to build custom data models and dashboards
for each of its 30 teams.
But with Looker, they didn't need to.
They instead created one standardized starting point
that each team could customize to their own needs.
Looker Blocks act as a foundation for analysis.
They will get you started down the path
and accelerate your ability to deploy a use case.
By utilizing prebuilt Blocks, you
can leverage expert knowledge and modeling best practices.
Nuances of complex data structures
are taken into account, such as the Block for Cloud cost
management, which helps manage spend across multiple Cloud
environments.
Blocks are developed by or with our trusted and expert partners
and product teams, sometimes for a specific customer use case,
and then they're packaged into the Marketplace.
Or you can leverage already built-in, advanced analytics,
like BigQuery ML.
Our customer Ritual used Looker Blocks for GMP
to sync multiple sources of data for a more holistic view
and further analyzed these insights
for new customer acquisition.
And applications give you a better understanding
of data structure and relationships.
For example, the Looker's data dictionary application
provides a dedicated centralized interface
to search through all your Looker and descriptions.
And there's many reasons to use the data dictionary, including
creating a reference source for all consumer
of external reports, provide a location for business users
to search for metric descriptions
that they can identify the appropriate dimension
or measure for analysis.
It makes it easy for external stakeholders
to identify and locate the unique metrics
for their business and audit LookML models
to assess whether consistent naming conventions are
followed, whether there are redundant fields
or if fields are annotated with descriptions.
When you have a use case that is more specialized,
you have a visualization that you can draw from.
And that will resonate more clearly with your audience.
And again, the MLB was looking to have the ability
to display any type of visualization
that they could build trust with their executive users.
So being able to address the needs of key decision makers
with custom visualizations was a turning point
to the power and flexibility of Looker.
And now, I would like to turn our presentation over
to Elena, who will continue to talk about the Marketplace
and show you more in-depth use of Looker Blocks.
ELENA ROWELL: Thank you so much for that introduction, Jean.
As I said at the beginning, my name is Elena,
and I am going to jump into some background on what we've
been doing in 2021.
I'll then go into a live demo of the Marketplace
and walk you through some of the content.
And then give you a sneak peek at what's to come in 2022.
So Jean alluded to both of these applications,
but I want to draw specific attention to these.
So in 2021, we've added two new applications
to the Looker Marketplace.
The first is the LookML Diagram.
It's effectively an ERD for your LookML model.
The value of it is that it allows
you to see how all of the different tables and views
are relating to each other and how everything is really
coming together to build that unified view for your users.
We also added the API Explorer.
API Explorer is something you're used to in our LookML
documentation, but now you can access it
directly from within the product within
this curated application.
The great part about these applications
is that they're built on top of our Extension Framework.
This Extension Framework is allowing
us to build applications faster and more scalably,
and should hopefully be a value add for you as well in building
your own applications.
This year, we've done a lot of work
to make sure that you can string together
multiple Blocks to deliver more complete use cases.
So I'll walk through these and highlight these in the demo,
but specifically our new Blocks for Cloud Cost Management
really take apart the use case into different Blocks
so that you can put it back together
in the way that makes sense for your data
and for your use case.
We've also built these phased Blocks for Contact Center
AI, a wonderful Google Cloud product
if you're not familiar with it.
We've also expanded the suite of Blocks
that we have for Google Marketing Platform.
We added a new Block for Google Analytics 4.
And like all of the Blocks for Google Marketing Platform,
when used together, these Blocks only make each other better.
So I talked a little bit about new content
that we've added to the Marketplace,
but we've also done work on the back end
to make sure that the Marketplace is working better
for you.
So Jean mentioned that we see Blocks as a great way
to start new analyses.
What we heard from you is that the Blocks
in the current structure weren't as easy to edit as maybe you
wanted.
And so what we've done is we've taken the construct of LookML
refinements, that hopefully you're familiar with--
and if you're not, go learn more about them--
and applied those to Looker Blocks.
And so, now, with Blocks and refinements,
you can download a Block and then
create your own LookML project to then go and refine
that Block.
To learn how to use LookML refinements in Blocks,
we're actually running a specific session
as part of Join.
So check out the hands-on lab for using and customizing
out-of-the-box analytics for fast insights.
So now that we've given you an idea of everything that's
in the Marketplace and why you want to use it,
I want to actually jump into the Marketplace,
and show you some of these things,
and show you how easy it is to use it.
So let's switch over to the demo.
When I land in my Looker instance,
I'm here on my home page.
And on the right-hand corner, I can see this little icon
for the Marketplace.
I'm going to click here and head over to the Marketplace.
So here we are in the Looker Marketplace.
In this demo, I'm going to walk you
through the installation of the Looker Block for Google
Analytics 360, the Looker application for LookML models,
as well as a plugin for a Sankey diagram in our instance.
So without further ado, let's get going.
I'm going to click on the Block section here
to go over to the Block side of our directory.
When I land in this section, I can
see that there's a huge number of Blocks available to me
to install on my instance.
So, for example, you can see a cluster of Blocks
that take advantage of BigQuery's machine learning
functionality, and bring that into the Looker user interface.
If you're looking for more ways to add machine learning
to your workflows, I definitely recommend testing those out.
During the session, I mentioned the solution
for Cloud Cost Management.
Here, you can see the Blocks that we
have available for those.
We have the Block for AWS, Azure, and GCP,
as well as phase one and phase two Blocks that
start to unify those other three Blocks to give you
that more holistic view of your billing data.
But we are here to download the Google Analytics 360 Block.
So I will scroll down, I will find my Analytics 360,
and I will open that up.
I'm dropped onto the listing page for the Marketplace item.
You can see here, I can see that we
have multiple versions of this.
The author is Looker, and I can read a little bit more
about what I'll get from it.
But I know that I want this, so we're
going to go ahead and start the installation process.
I'll click through the licensing agreement and permissions,
and now I'm asked to configure my block.
So this is how I tell Looker where
to get the data it's going to connect to.
So I'll set my connection name.
I know that that's the right table name.
And we will go ahead and install.
Once the installation is complete,
I am dropped onto my Manage section of the Marketplace,
and I can see that I have successfully installed
our Block for Analytics 360.
Here it is at the bottom.
And so let's go and check out what I've gotten.
When I open this up, I can see that I
have a handful of dashboards as well as two different Looker
explorers.
If I go into this, it will load the data
and the dashboards based on that connection name
that I mentioned.
And voila, this is an overview of my Google Analytics
360 data as stored in BigQuery that
has been made available to me from the Looker
Block from the Marketplace, all in just a few simple clicks.
We've seen the power of the Marketplace to install Blocks.
Let's go and check out what we need to install an application.
Back in the Marketplace homepage,
I can see that there's three applications at the top here.
These are Looker's first three applications
that we've seeded our Marketplace with.
I mentioned this during the talk,
but definitely check back here throughout next year,
as we'll continue to add new applications.
For today, though, we're going to install this LookML Diagram.
The LookML Diagram is an entity relationship diagram
that tells us all about the things happening
in our instance.
So let's go ahead and install this.
And I'll click through these permissions, set the connection
name I want to look at and the tables that I
want to understand, and voila.
One new LookML Diagram added to my instance.
We can see our GA 360 block right above.
And we can open this up and see what we've gotten.
So now that I've downloaded the LookML Diagram,
I'm actually going to use this product
to understand the block that we downloaded
prior for Google Analytics 360.
So we're going to select that model,
and then we have now all of the different explorers.
And I want to dig in on Sessions.
So we can see here all of the different relationships
between all the different tables that this explorer
is leveraging.
And if we want, we can even go and click in and understand
some of the measures or dimensions
that we've also built out in here.
Again, all of this is just with a few clicks
from the Marketplace to install these new items.
So for this example, we're looking at session data
from Google Analytics 360.
And a great way to look at session data
is with a Sankey diagram.
However, Looker doesn't offer a Sankey diagram directly out
of the box.
As you can imagine, that visualization
has been made available to customers
through the Marketplace.
This is the final section of content in the Marketplace--
Plug-ins.
In the Plug-ins section, I can see
all of the different visualization
options that are available to me within the Marketplace.
We talked about doing the Sankey diagram,
so we're going to click on that.
Again, I'm landed on my installation page.
I click the Install button.
Accept the terms.
This is what I want to call it.
And voila, there it is.
So this Sankey visualization is now available to me
within my Looker instance.
So if I go back to this Google Analytics 360 Block
and scroll down here to the Explore section--
I'm now in the Explore section of the Google Analytics 360
Block that I just installed.
And if I go into my Visualizations tab
and click the More button, I can see
that Sankey is now available to me to visualize this data.
That concludes our demo for today.
As a reminder, we went through the Google Analytics Block.
That gave us new data model, explorers,
and dashboards to work on our Google Analytics 360 data.
We downloaded the LookML Diagram.
That gave us the ability to actually go and explore
all of the different models that we imported through that block.
And then, finally, we installed a custom visualization
to be able to visualize the Sankey.
All from the Looker Marketplace.
All right.
Well, hopefully that brought the Marketplace to life for you
and you're excited to jump in and check out the Marketplace
in your own product.
I now want to talk to you about what
the future of the Marketplace is and what
we have coming for you in 2022.
First off, as Jean alluded to, we
are going to be moving Actions into the Marketplace.
Additionally, today, plug-ins are really
very focused on visualizations.
But in 2022, we will be adding new types of plug-ins
to the Marketplace.
In addition to doing types of content,
we're also just going to add new content.
We'll add expanded support for different products
that come from Google Cloud.
There's a lot of data that comes off of Google Cloud,
and we're in a great position to be able to offer you
out-of-the-box analytics for them.
Additionally, new partner applications
will be available within the Marketplace.
We are also adding more of our own applications.
In short, keep an eye on the application section
of the Marketplace.
Finally, many of you may be familiar with the predecessor
of the Marketplace, the Looker Blocks Directory.
In 2022, we'll be doing some rationalization work
to bring the Marketplace online in a public setting
so that you can share that with people who don't have access
to your Looker instance.
Now, that closes us out for today.
Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us here
and for being at Join in general.
We wish that we could be with you in person,
but at least, we have this.
Thanks again, and have a great day.