In Looker, we have the ability to drill from dimensions to dashboards, using hierarchical drill menus. Read more about hierarchical drilling in Looker's documentation about the drill_fields parameter.

This post refers to the Labs feature, which automatically identifies potential dashboards to drill to from a given dimension. To specify links to specific dashboards (or other non-Looker URLs), you can use the links parameter.

To drill from dimensions to dashboards, your Looker administrator first needs to enable the Dashboards in Drill Menus Labs feature. The feature can be enabled by navigating to the Labs page in the Admin panel.

When Do Dashboards Appear in the Drill Menu?

Once the Dashboards in Drill Menus feature is enabled, dashboards will automatically appear in the drill menu if they have a filter on the field you are drilling into. This happens in a couple of cases:

1. There is a global filter on the dashboard of type: Field that points to the field into which you are drilling.
2. There is a dashboard filter applied to the field in a dashboard tile. For example, there might be a dashboard filter of type: number applied to the field users.age in a particular dashboard tile. This will cause the dashboard to appear in the drill menu for the users.age field.
3. Dashboards are in Shared folders (known as Spaces in releases earlier than Looker 6.20).

What Will Drilling to a Dashboard Do?

Consider a Business Pulse dashboard that has a global filter on users.state:

If Dashboards in Drill Menus is enabled, this dashboard will appear as an option in the drill menu for the users.state field like so:

When the dashboard name is clicked, it will take you to the dashboard with the filter set to this particular state:

This is a great way to explore your data further through dashboards!

Read more about other methods of drilling with the following Help Center articles:

1. Custom Drilling Using HTML and Link.
2. More Powerful Data Drilling