Looker is an enterprise platform for business intelligence, data applications, and embedded analytics. Looker helps you explore, share, and visualize your company's data so that you can make better business decisions.
How Looker works
Looker lets data experts at each organization describe their data using a lightweight modeling language called LookML. LookML tells Looker how to query data, so everyone in the organization can create easy-to-read reports and dashboards to explore patterns of data. Looker offers additional features for creating custom data applications and experiences.
Looker's platform works with transactional databases as well as analytical datastores. Looker lets you create consistent data models on top of all your data with speed and accuracy. It also offers a unified surface to access all of an organization's data.
Looker integration with Spanner
Looker supports hosting in Google Cloud. Because Looker is platform independent, it connects to data in Spanner as well as other public clouds.
You don't need Looker to use Spanner. However, if your Spanner use case includes business intelligence, data applications, or embedded analytics, you might want to review Looker as a provider of these services.
If you already have a Looker instance running, see the instructions for connecting Looker to Spanner.
What's next
There are many options related to administering Looker, customizing its data model, and exposing data to users. For more information, see the following resources: