Likelihood to Recommend I think this tool is an absolute have to have for MSPs, especially those using
ConnectWise PSA for a ticketing system. From internal KPIs to showing customer's the value of your Managed Service, you will need this tool. 9/10 because the need for longer data sets is growing for my team. Trend lines over time are a big push industry wide to show improvements in our customers over the time as our MSP customer. Presently my team has to use CW
PSA 's Report Writer and that tool is the least user friendly we've encountered. Looking forward to the evolution of BrightGauge for our business
Read full review Quick dashboards from
Google Sheets - Easier to do the graphs than in
Google Sheets - Operational dashboards to be used in the day-to-day work - It is good both for retrospective data and to do a pulse check of the current status - Better for not giant amounts of data and not multiple data sources. - If you need a lot of graphs to be displayed on the same page, it can be a bit glitchy during configuration (then the use works fine).
Read full review Pros Robust and flexible kinds of dashboards and gauges Great customer support that often leaves custom video recordings answering your question, showing you how to do what you're asking Good ability to tie into critical data sources for our company's operations Read full review Filtering - you can filter across different dimensions and metrics to get a more specific "cut" of data Refreshing - data automatically ingests into Looker which allows reports to be updated and backfilled in real time Conditional Reporting - you can leverage Looker's reporting features to flag when a given metric or KPI falls below or above a specified threshold. For example, if you had a daily sales benchmark in a SAAS organization, you could use Looker to flag whenever daily sales falls above or below the benchmark Read full review Cons Modifying data sets to bring in custom fields requires an experienced SQL engineer Cost when bringing in lots of data sources can be prohibitive Limited ability to format gauges and reports Make MFA a requirement - this data is sensitive and giving the admin the ability to force MFA is a MUST! Read full review Looker is less graphical or pictorial which makes it less attractive Consumes a lot of memory when there are multiple rows and columns, impacts performance too At times when we download huge chunks of raw data from Looker dashbords, the time taken to prepare the file is enormous - The user fails to understand if Looker has frozen or if the data is getting prepared in the background for downloading. In turn, user ends up triggering multiple downloads Read full review Likelihood to Renew We've been very happy with Looker so far, and all teams in the organization are starting to see its value, and use it on a frequent basis. It has quickly become our accessible "source of truth" for all data/metrics.
Read full review Usability Usability is BrightGauge's strength. Granting the ability of virtually any user to be able to create a dashboard is incredibly valuable. If an organization very simple and straight forward reporting needs then BrightGauge is a perfect fit for them. Connecting to the dataset we used was very quick and easy and I imagine it would be the same for any major data source you would like to pull from.
Read full review Looker is relatively easy to use, even as it is set up. The customers for the front-end only have issues with the initial setup for looker ml creations. Other "looks" are relatively easy to set up, depending on the ETL and the data which is coming into Looker on a regular basis.
Read full review Support Rating We did not need to use BrightGauge's support for the entire time that we used it. Best support is always the one that isn't needed because nothing breaks.
Read full review Never had to work with support for issues. Any questions we had, they would respond promptly and clearly. The one-time setup was easy, by reading documentation. If the feature is not supported, they will add a feature request. In this case, LDAP support was requested over OKTA. They are looking into it.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We looked very briefly at Solar Winds, but due to Connectwise the reporting was not very accurate and was conflicted.
Read full review Looker is an off-the-shelf, free tool for Google business users. Other than the internal cost of time to build, we had no costs to set up what we needed to do. Knowledge sharing internally and using templates greatly reduced this cost, making the overall cost very low.
Read full review Return on Investment Faster compilation of Business Review material For larger customers, the dashboarding has helped our customers to remain sticky and add services/revenue to our MSP. They want to add more fragments of their IT for the 1 pane rollup. From a leadership perspective, BG has allowed me to make difficult staffing decisions with confidence. Detailed metric driven decisions on who is hitting KPIs/who isn't - as well as when data proved we were overstaffed and understaffed. Read full review Allowing others to self-serve their own analytics and connect it to Looker simply and easily has helped unblock the central data team so they can instead focus on validated dashboards whilst stakeholders manage their day-to-day analysis themselves. Countless engineering hours have been freed up by not having to manage every user permission for each BI tool; we have a BYOBI approach; Bring Your Own BI Creation and management of a semantic layer (LookML =Looker Modeling Language ) allows peoples sandboxes and production databases to become clutter free. Minor adjustments, conditional fields, and even some modelling can all be done in LookML which doesn't need oversight or governance from the central data team. LookML, specifying drilldown fields and their sub-queries, as well as generally creating dynamic parameters with Liquid are all great features, but can have a steep learning curve. it may take some time to understand how to create this middle layer correctly, or even pose a risk of inheriting complex code from another source which can be unmaintainable if it becomes too big. Some level of governance is recommended if Looker is used by a large number of editors. Read full review ScreenShots