Configuring content deliveries for Looker users

Admins play a critical role in enabling users to deliver Looker content and in configuring the Looker instance for customized content delivery. To manage users' access to and use of Looker's content delivery capabilities, admins can:

Looker admins can also configure other Looker instance settings that:

Granting scheduling permissions for users

Scheduling permissions are tied both to the type of Looker content and to the delivery destination.

See the Settings documentation page for information about scheduling permissions for embed users.

Delivery permissions for content

To deliver each type of Looker content, users need these permissions — and any permissions that those permissions depend on — for the model that the content is based on.

The following table provides permission definition summaries as they apply to delivering content. See the permissions list in the Roles documentation for complete descriptions of each permission.

Permission Definition
explore Can access Explores.
see_looks Can access Looks.
see_user_dashboards Can access user-defined dashboards and the tiles in the dashboards, including Look-linked tiles.
see_lookml_dashboards Can access LookML dashboards.

Admins may also choose to grant users the see_schedules permission, which exposes part of the Admin menu for users to access the list of all schedules that exist on the Looker instance from the Schedules and Schedule History admin pages. Non-admins will not be able to edit or delete schedules from these admin pages; instead, users can view and manage their own schedules from their user profile.

Delivery permissions for destinations

Admins must also assign users the permissions to deliver content to specific destination types, including Looker's native delivery destinations and any third-party integrations that have been enabled for the Looker instance. Native destinations include:

Looker's third-party integrated services — also called actions — are delivered through an action hub server. A Looker admin must enable these actions from the Actions page in the Platform section of the Admin panel.

Users must have these permissions — and any permissions that those permissions depend on — assigned for the model that the Looker content is based on.

The following table provides permission definition summaries as they apply to delivering content. See the permissions list in the Roles documentation for complete descriptions of each permission.

Permission Definition
admin In addition to the capabilities provided by each of the permissions associated with each delivery destination, users with this permission can view all scheduling pages in the Admin panel of Looker.
schedule_look_emails Users can deliver Looker content to email. If no email domains are specified in the Email domain allowlist on the Settings page of the Admin panel, the user can deliver to any email domain.

Users can schedule deliveries to occur after a datagroup has been triggered, has managed the cache, and has rebuilt relevant persisted derived tables (PDTs).

To send or schedule System Activity dashboards, users must have access to all models.
schedule_external_look_emails Users can deliver Looker content to email. If any email domains are specified in the Email domain allowlist on the Settings page of the Admin panel, the user can deliver to any email domain.
send_to_s3 Users can deliver Looker content to an Amazon S3 bucket. Users can schedule deliveries to occur after a datagroup has been triggered, has managed the cache, and has rebuilt relevant persisted derived tables (PDTs).
send_to_sftp Users can deliver Looker content using SFTP. Users can schedule deliveries to occur after a datagroup has been triggered, has managed the cache, and has rebuilt relevant persisted derived tables (PDTs).
send_outgoing_webhook Users can deliver Looker content using webhook. Users can schedule deliveries to occur after a datagroup has been triggered, has managed the cache, and has rebuilt relevant persisted derived tables (PDTs).
send_to_integration Users can deliver Looker content using third-party integrated services — also called actions — through an action hub server. If using custom actions with user attributes, users must have this permission and have a non-null and valid user attribute value for the specified user attribute to deliver Looker content to that action destination.

This permission is not related to the LookML action parameter.

Users can schedule deliveries to occur after a datagroup has been triggered, has managed the cache, and has rebuilt relevant persisted derived tables (PDTs).

Managing schedules created by all users

Admins can view, reassign, and delete content delivery schedules from the Schedules page and can view the history of and troubleshoot scheduled content deliveries from the Schedule History page, both accessible from the Alerts & Schedules section of the Admin panel. Admins should be careful about deleting or disabling a user who may be the owner of important scheduled deliveries, because such an action will also delete or disable the schedules.

Admins can also monitor what Looker content is being delivered to users with external email domains in the External Recipients section of the Scheduled Emails admin page.

Things to consider

  • Content deliveries are always run on Production Mode LookML. Content deliveries cannot be set up by a user who is in Development Mode.

  • Looker schedules data deliveries according to the time zone indicated in the Application Time Zone setting on the Admin Settings page, or, if enabled, the schedule creator's User Specific Time Zone.

  • If there are valid results in cache, Looker will deliver cached results. If there are no results or if the cached results have expired, Looker will rerun the query and cache those results.

  • At times, a scheduled delivery could show that it has been sent successfully but fail to reach one or more of its recipients. This could happen if the underlying model has an error, if the recipient does not have access to the data, or if there are rendering problems or page errors. The destination reports an error if it is unable to connect to the specified endpoint. If such issues occur, Looker sends the person who set up the schedule an email, which includes a link to the content, a list of the recipients it failed to reach, and more information, if available, about the problem that Looker encountered when trying to reach the recipient.

Known issues with content deliveries

In the Admin section of Looker, admins can use the Scheduler Plans and Scheduler History pages to look up and resolve schedule issues.

Admins should note that deleting or disabling a user may have an effect on schedules owned by that user, schedules based on content owned by that user, or schedules that list that user as a recipient. For more information about how removing user access affects content deliveries, see the Users documentation page.

If you encounter any problems with deliveries of large Excel files, see the discussion about managing large files in Excel format on the Managing business user features documentation page.

Certain scheduling options require that admins of customer-hosted Looker deployments have installed the Chromium renderer for their Looker instance. Admins can read more about rendering image-based data formats when sending and scheduling dashboards, Looks, or Explores on the Managing business user features documentation page.

See the Managing business user features page for more admin-specific information about scheduling deliveries of Looker content.