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Looker-Hosted Infrastructure Migration Information

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Kenneth Vinson
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Looker is in the process of upgrading our hosting infrastructure to deliver better scalability and reliability. This upgrade will also give you access to new Looker features as they are developed.

You will need to take action to ensure continued, uninterrupted service. Looker is working hard to make this transition as seamless as possible. The following instructions provide details. Please review them and reach out via help.looker.com or your Looker team if you need any assistance or have any questions.

Also, please be aware that, upon upgrade, all your persistent derived tables will rebuild. This may cause additional load to your database.

Connecting Looker to your database

There are two ways Looker may be talking to your databases. Both will require updates to ensure continued data access. You may have several databases, each using different techniques.

IP address allowlist

If you're connecting Looker to your database by allowing specific IP addresses through your network layer, you will need to add a new IP to your list of allowed addresses on your network. This step can be done ahead of time. See the Enabling Secure Database Access documentation page if you are unfamiliar with the process.

  1. Go to the Enabling secure database access documentation page and identify the IP addresses associated with your instance's region (the United States is the default) and hosting provider. The new addresses will be listed under Instances Hosted on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Instances Hosted on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), or Instances Hosted on Microsoft Azure.
  2. Allow access to the above IP addresses through your networking layer (the specific method will depend on the database in question). Do not remove the legacy IPs at this time.

SSH tunnel

If you're connecting Looker to your database through an SSH tunnel, your tunnel configurations will carry over to the new infrastructure. The only action you will need to take will be to update your allowed IP addresses on your network. See the Enabling secure database access documentation page if you're unfamiliar with using SSH tunnels.

  1. Go to the Enabling secure database access documentation page and identify the IP addresses associated with your instance's region (the United States is the default) and hosting provider. The new addresses will be listed under Instances Hosted on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Instances Hosted on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), or Instances Hosted on Microsoft Azure.
  2. Allow access to the above IP addresses through your networking layer (the specific method will depend on the database in question). Do not remove the legacy IPs at this time.

Connecting Looker to third-party services

You may have additional services that Looker communicates with. As explained in the "IP address allowlist" section above, your next-generation Looker instance will have a different outbound IP address and Looker won't be able to connect if you are restricting access. Notable examples of services include GitHub Enterprise accounts or a local action hub server.

If your infrastructure relies on lists of allowed IP addresses for connections to specific services, you need to update these lists the same way you would to allow database access.

  1. Go to the Enabling secure database access documentation page, and identify the IP addresses associated with your instance's region (the United States is the default) and hosting provider. The new addresses will be listed under Instances Hosted on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Instances Hosted on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), or Instances Hosted on Microsoft Azure.
  2. Allow access to the above IP addresses through your networking layer (the specific method will depend on the service in question). Do not remove the legacy IPs at this time.

NOTE: The following section is only relevant if you are changing your hosting environment to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). No need to read further unless you or someone at your organization has had discussions with Looker about changing from the historical default hosting provider of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to GCP.

Accessing Looker via the API - GCP only

Connecting to Looker from your browser will not change; humans can continue to do what they have always done. If you are using the Looker API, you may need to take action to ensure uninterrupted service. If you are not sure, you can use this System Activity query to see if there has been recent API usage on your instance:

<your_instance_url>/explore/system__activity/event?fields=event.created_week,event.count,event.category&pivots=event.category&fill_fields=event.created_week&f[event.is_api_call]=Yes&sorts=event.created_week+desc,event.category&limit=500&total=on&row_total=right

If there are no results, you are not using the API and don't have to take any further action.

Custom API host URL - GCP only

  1. Check Admin -> API to see if there is a value set for API Host URL.
  2. If a value is set, you don't need to do anything further.
  3. If a value is not set, you have a choice: either set a value using these instructions and update your API processes to use it (recommended, as it will allow you to make the configuration changes ahead of time without loss of service), or proceed to the "Specifying an API port" section below.
  4. After configuring your custom API host URL in the Looker application, you will need to update your API processes to connect via that URL rather than specified port numbers (for example, https://my.api.looker.com rather than https://my.looker.com:19999).

Specifying an API port - GCP only

If you do not use a custom API host URL, you will need to update your API processes to connect to a new port. Our next-generation hosting infrastructure uses port 443. If you are not using a custom API host URL, update from the current default API port of 19999 to port 443.

Locate your API processes, and change the API port references from 19999 to 443 (for example, use https://my.looker.com:443 rather than https://my.looker.com:19999).

This technique cannot be used without a service interruption. If you choose to update the port in your API processes prior to the upgrade, the processes will not be able to access your Looker instance until the upgrade is complete. For this reason, we recommend that you do it immediately prior to the scheduled upgrade.

If you choose to update your processes after the infrastructure upgrade, automated processes will not be able to access your Looker instance during the period in between the upgrade and the time the port change is complete.