Item: Looker
Rating: 7
Author: Anson Abraham

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Looker currently is being used by our organization to make business decisions on buying or selling inventory in the ad tech space. The key decisions being made allow for the KPIs to give a larger return on investment or minimize cap losses based on the reporting the metrics that looker provides for us.

Pros and Cons

Ease of use of report creation
SQL syntax to modify or create reports
Drag and drop functionalities
Dashboard creation

More data source connections
Licensing model
Integration with Active Directory or LDAP. Only OKTA for now.

Return on Investment

ROI increased using looker, vs in-house built reporting.
Management of looker less invasive vs other tools.
Ease of use and creation for non-tech users

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Online and QlikView

Looker was easier to use, better integration with non-standard datastores, such as Prestodb, and Snowflake, and BigTable. Ease of manageability. Creation of reports faster and easier compared to QlikView. Tableau has better heat maps, however, Looker has better drill down in heat map compared to Tableau. Licensing is cheaper than QlikView.

Key Insights

Do you think Looker delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Looker's feature set?

Yes

Did Looker live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Looker go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Looker again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Tableau Online, QlikView, Pentaho, TIBCO Jaspersoft

Usability

Nontechnical users can create reports easily. Can create customized reports individually or on the whole for the group. Slicing and dicing data through Looker fairly simple. Drill-downs are much better than anticipated. Especially heat map drill-downs, became most popular within the company, considering the company is a location analytics ad tech company.

Support Rating

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are looking at Looker for key performance metrics for IT-related things (like a data dog aspect), this will not be the use case you would want to use Looker. This is great for looking at the overall performance of sales, inventory, and dashboards of information related to the business itself.

Look no further than into Looker

Overall Satisfaction with Looker