This page describes Looker’s new dashboard experience. For information on legacy dashboards, visit the Delivering legacy dashboards documentation page. To determine which type of dashboard you are using, compare the screenshots on the Viewing dashboards and Viewing legacy dashboards documentation pages.

This page is about scheduling and sending a dashboard. To learn about scheduling legacy dashboards, Looks, or Explores, visit the Using the Looker Scheduler to deliver content documentation page.

Looker lets you schedule immediate or recurring deliveries of dashboards with the Schedule delivery dashboard menu option.

Depending on how your Looker admin has set up your permissions for data delivery, you may be able to deliver your content to one or more of Looker’s native delivery destinations:

• Email
• Webhook
• Amazon S3 bucket
• SFTP server

You may also be able to schedule a data delivery to a third-party service that is integrated with Looker, such as Slack.

If there are valid results in cache, Looker will deliver cached results. If there are no results or if the cached results have expired, Looker will rerun the query and cache those results.

Starting a delivery from a dashboard

If you are a Looker developer, you must turn off Development Mode to schedule or send. Deliveries are executed using Production Mode LookML.

Make sure the dashboard is not in edit mode. Click the three-dot menu in the upper right of the dashboard and choose Schedule delivery. If you do not see the Schedule delivery option, talk to your Looker admin about your assigned permissions:

Once you click Schedule delivery, either an existing schedules window appears or a schedule and send window appears, depending on whether or not you have already created existing schedules on the dashboard.

Existing schedules window

If you have already created schedules for this dashboard, an existing schedules window appears that shows the schedules you have set along with some information about each one, such as destination and format. Deliveries using the Send now recurrence and schedules made by other people do not appear in this window.

Click Send now to send an immediate delivery of existing scheduled content without disrupting the scheduled cadence.

Click the three-dot menu to edit, duplicate, or delete a schedule.

Click Done to exit the window.

Click New to open the schedule and send window and create a new schedule or immediately send a new delivery.

Schedule and send window

If you click New from the existing schedules window, or, if you do not have any pre-existing schedules for the dashboard, a schedule and send window opens. This window lets you customize recurrence, destination, format, filters, and more:

The Settings tab in the schedule and send window lets you customize your delivery’s recurrence, destination, format, and more.

Starting a delivery from a folder

You can also start a delivery of a dashboard from the folder where the dashboard is located.

Select Schedule delivery from the three-dot menu on the right side of that dashboard’s row (in list view) or from the three-dot menu at the top right of the thumbnail (in grid view).

Naming a delivery

The top of the schedule and send window shows the name automatically given to the delivery. The name defaults to the dashboard’s name. To edit the delivery’s name, click the name (indicated by the dotted underscore), and make your edits:

Depending on the destination of your delivery, the title may also appear in other places:

• For email deliveries, the title is used for the email’s subject line and as part of the filename if you select a format that uses an email attachment.
• For webhooks, the title is included in the webhook payload under the Title field.
• For deliveries to an Amazon S3 bucket, the title is used in the filename of the delivery and in any error emails that are sent. The filename of the delivery follows the format TITLE_TIMESTAMP_HASH, where HASH is a random six-character identifier and TIMESTAMP follows the pattern YYYY-MM-DDTHHMM (for example, the timestamp portion would look like 2019-05-31T0933 for May 31, 2019 at 9:33 AM).
• For SFTP deliveries, the title is included in the filename of the delivery. The filename of the delivery follows the format TITLE_TIMESTAMP_HASH, where HASH is a random six-character identifier and TIMESTAMP follows the pattern YYYY-MM-DDTHHMM (for example, the timestamp portion would look like 2019-05-31T0933 for May 31, 2019 at 9:33 AM).
• For deliveries to integrated services that generate a file attachment, the title is included in the filename of the delivery.

Recurrence

Customize the timing of your delivery in the Recurrence section.

Send now

If you select Send now from the Recurrence drop-down menu, a one-time delivery of the dashboard is sent after you fill in the required fields and click the Send now button at the bottom of the window.

Time-based and date-based schedules

Select one of the following options from the Recurrence drop-down menu:

• Monthly
• Weekly
• Daily
• Hourly
• Minutes
• Specific months
• Specific days

Timing options change depending on the option that you choose. Here are the Hourly settings:

The Time, Start, and End fields use a 24-hour clock. If the desired time is not available in the drop-down menu, click within the field and manually enter your desired time, such as 9:15 or 15:37.

Hourly and Minutes schedules repeat daily within the Start and End timeframe that you set. The end time for Hourly and Minutes intervals is not inclusive. The last delivery is sent at the last selected interval prior to the specified end time. For example, if a dashboard is scheduled Hourly between 12:00 a.m. and 11:00 p.m., then it is sent on the hour, every hour, from 12:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. If a recurrence is every 30 minutes between 12:00 a.m. and 11:00 p.m., then the last delivery is sent at 10:30 p.m.

Schedules triggered by datagroup updates

If your LookML developer has configured datagroups, you can schedule delivery of a dashboard to occur after a datagroup has been triggered, has managed the cache, and has rebuilt relevant PDTs.

Select Datagroup update from the Recurrence drop-down menu. This reveals a Datagroup field with a drop-down menu. Select the datagroup whose update will prompt delivery.

To schedule a dashboard using a datagroup update trigger, the dashboard must contain at least one tile that is based on a model file that includes a datagroup parameter. The Datagroup drop-down menu lists all datagroups defined in the models included in the dashboard, even if the datagroups are not used to handle caching for queries or PDTs. Even if the datagroup is used in only one tile’s model, the entire dashboard will be sent when the selected datagroup update completes.

Schedules based on datagroups only send after the regeneration process has completed for all PDTs that are persisted with that datagroup parameter, ensuring that your delivery includes the most up-to-date data.

Destination

Depending on how your Looker admin has configured your permissions, some of these destinations may not be visible.

The Destination setting may display several destination options for dashboard deliveries. Once you’ve selected a data destination, a new setting field appears for you to add specific details about that destination, such as an email address or a webhook URL. See the following sections for information about each destination’s settings.

Email

When Email is selected in the Destination field, a new Email addresses field appears. This is a required field.

Enter the email addresses of the recipients in the Email addresses field. If entering multiple email addresses click the Enter key or add a comma after each address.

Depending on the settings for your Looker instance and on your assigned permissions, you may be able to send emails to email addresses that are unassociated with any user account on your Looker instance. These are classified as external emails. The All and External indicators at the right of the field show the numbers of all email recipients as well as the number of external email recipients. Clicking on each indicator toggles between showing all email recipients and only the external email recipients. To deliver content to external users, your Looker admin must have granted you permissions to deliver content to external users or have added those recipients’ email domains to the Email Domain Allowist for Scheduled Content.

If a recipient is another Looker user, that person will see the option to link back to the dashboard from the email, unless your Looker admin has set your Looker instance’s emailed data policy to Send Data Only or the Include links option is deselected.

Emailed deliveries may not exceed 20 MB (for formats that are delivered in the email body) and 15 MB (for formats that are delivered as an attachment).

See the Advanced options section on this page for more information about email deliveries.

Webhook

Webhooks are a way to trigger exchanges between internet-based services. With a web service like Zapier, webhooks can let Looker data be delivered to a wide range of applications; for example, you may be able to schedule periodic delivery of a dashboard to a webhook.

To set up a webhook, go to your web service and do the following:

• Obtain a URL to which Looker should send an HTTPS request.
• Specify a destination application for your Looker data delivery. The destination application may require additional configuration in order to receive data from Looker.

The exact procedure differs depending on what web service and destination application you’re using to deliver the data. See this Community topic for guidelines on setting up another application to receive the webhook data from Looker.

When Webhook is selected in the Destination field, a new Webhook URL field appears. This is a required field.

Enter the URL where Looker should send an HTTPS request for this delivery in the Webhook URL field. You can obtain this URL from the web service you’re using to handle your webhook.

Looker will attempt delivery to a webhook for a maximum of 30 minutes. Ensure that the destination can respond within 30 minutes to the webhook delivery attempt.

Amazon S3

Amazon S3 buckets are a common way to store large amounts of data. You or your company will need to have created an S3 bucket with Amazon before Looker can use it.

When Amazon S3 is selected in the Destination field, several new fields appear and prompt you for information about your Amazon S3 bucket:

• Bucket: The name of your Amazon S3 bucket. This is a required field.
• Optional Path: The folder, if any, that you want to save your data to.
• Access Key: The Access Key ID to your S3 bucket, provided by Amazon. This is a required field.
• Secret Key: The Secret Access Key to your S3 bucket, provided by Amazon. This is a required field.
• Region: The Amazon services region where your S3 bucket is hosted.

Check out this Looker Community topic for more details about delivering data using an Amazon S3 bucket.

SFTP

Sending results to an SFTP server is a good method to use when your data or visualization is too large to send through email.

To receive SFTP deliveries from Looker, be sure your network admin has added Looker’s IP addresses to your SFTP server’s IP allowlist or inbound traffic rules.

When SFTP is selected in the Destination field, several new fields appear and prompt you for information about your Amazon S3 bucket:

• Address: The URL or IP address of the SFTP server to which you want to send your data. This is a required field. For example:
  sftp://files.looker.com/Marketing/In/
  or
  sftp://192.168.0.10/Marketing/In/

  This example URL ends with the / character. This indicates that the file will be saved in a folder named In. If you leave out the trailing /, the file will be saved in the Marketing folder, and “In” will be prepended to the filename. You must have write access to the folder in which you want to create the file.

• Username and Password: Login credentials for the SFTP server. These are required fields.

• Preferred key exchange algorithm: This field is optional. To configure it, choose the preferred SSH key exchange algorithm for establishing the connection. If the connection is not established within five minutes, choose a different algorithm. Some algorithms take a long time to generate an SSH key. This option lets you use an algorithm that might take less time. Choosing one of the algorithms makes it the preferred algorithm for establishing the SSH connection. If the algorithm is not supported by the server, all the other algorithms are used in subsequent attempts. When this field is set to Default, the original order of algorithms in the connection library is used.

SFTP support is limited to username and password credentials. SSH private key credentials are not supported.

Looker stores SFTP fingerprints for your SFTP server. If you encounter errors with your SFTP delivery, it could indicate that the SFTP fingerprints are invalid. In this case, contact your Looker admin.

If you receive the error Java::JavaLang::NullPointerExceptions when delivering data to an SFTP server, see the Help Center article on how to deal with this Java error.

Integrated service destinations

You can schedule or send dashboard deliveries to a service that is integrated with Looker, such as Slack, Dropbox, Google Drive, and others. Integrations must be enabled by your Looker admin. Looker admins must specifically give permissions for users and embed users to send and schedule data to third-party integrations.

When an integrated service is selected in the Destination field, several new fields may appear and prompt you for more information.

See more about delivering data from integrations in the Delivering dashboard or query data section of the Sharing data through an action hub documentation page.

To see a description of the information each service requires, find your service destination in the list below and click the View Looker article link in the How to Use This Destination column.

Format

The Format field contains a drop-down menu of available formats:

• CSV zip file: The unformatted data from the dashboard delivered as a collection of comma-separated values (CSV) files in a zipped directory. For deliveries to email, the ZIP file is delivered as an email attachment.
• PDF: An image of the dashboard as a single PDF file. The default layout displays tiles as they are arranged in the dashboard, but other layout and sizing options are available under Advanced options. For deliveries to email, the file is delivered as an email attachment.
• PNG visualization: An image of the dashboard as a single PNG file. The default layout displays tiles as they are arranged in the dashboard, but other layout options are available under Advanced options. For deliveries to email, the image appears inline within the body of the email.

If you have selected email as a destination and your Looker admin has set your Looker instance’s emailed data policy to Send Link Only, the option to select a data format is not available.

Advanced options

The Advanced options tab provides additional customization for your delivery. The options available depend on the selected destination and format of your delivery.

Custom message

This option is available only for the email destination.

Enter a message you would like included in the body of emails to recipients.

Run schedule as recipient

This option is available only for the email destination.

If a user is not a Looker admin, the user can only see and check the Run schedule as recipient option if their own email address is the only address in the Email addresses field on the Settings tab for that schedule.

If a user is a Looker admin, the Run schedule as recipient option lets the admin specify a list of users who will each receive the content delivery as if each one of them ran the query, based on each person’s permissions. Non-admin users may also enter their own email address to receive a delivery as if they had queried the content, based on their permissions. This means that each user’s access filters and user attributes will be applied to the data that is included in each email.

For example, say that a Looker admin needs to schedule the following report to a series of users, and each user has different access filter values:

User A has an access filter set as users.state = 'California'. When Run schedule as recipient is selected, the scheduled query will apply the access filter users.state = 'California' and send the following filtered results to user A:

In the Advanced options tab, select the Run schedule as recipient checkbox and then add email addresses for your recipients in the Email addresses text field under the Settings tab. This option takes into account the permissions of the user creating the schedule as well as the types of email addresses added to the Email addresses field. In some cases, the Run schedule as recipient option is not available:

1. When a non-admin adds an email address other than their own
2. When a Looker admin adds the email of a disabled user

3. When a Looker admin adds an email that does not belong to a Looker user, as indicated by the External count above the list of recipients:

   

In these situations, regardless of whether the option was selected before or after entering the external email address, the Run schedule as recipient option will remain enabled but the schedule cannot be saved until the Run schedule as recipient option is de-selected or the external email addressed is removed from the list of recipients.

In the special case where a user is listed as a recipient on a schedule that has Run schedule as recipient enabled and then that user’s account is disabled, the schedule will fail to deliver to the disabled user starting the next time it runs. If that user’s account is deleted, the entire schedule will fail to deliver to any recipients. A Looker admin or user with the see_schedules permission will be able to diagnose this failure in the Scheduler History page in the Admin panel.

Include links

This option is available only for the email destination.

If your Looker admin has set your Looker instance’s emailed data policy to Send Links and Data, the schedule and send window displays the Include links option. Select this option to include in the data delivery emails a View full dashboard link that goes to the dashboard in Looker.

Recipients must log in to Looker and have permissions to access the models on which the delivered dashboard is based to view that content in Looker. If you want to remove this link from your data delivery emails, clear the Include links checkbox.

Results

This field is available only for CSV ZIP file formats of dashboard deliveries. It contains two options: With visualizations options applied or As displayed in the data table. You can choose one or the other.

Choose the With visualizations options applied option to apply some of the visualization settings from the dashboard tiles to your dashboard delivery. This causes the files in your delivery to appear similar to table charts. Any of the following settings in the Plot, Series, and Formatting menus that are configured for a visualization will be applied to the data delivery:

• Show Row Numbers
• Hide Totals
• Hide Row Totals
• Limit Displayed Rows to a maximum of 500 rows shown or hidden
• Show Full Field Name
• Custom labels for each column

Choose the As displayed in the data table option to deliver the data as it appears in the data table of each dashboard tile’s Explore from here window.

Values

This field is available only for CSV ZIP file formats of dashboard deliveries. It contains two options: Formatted or Unformatted. You can choose one or the other.

• Select Formatted if you want the data to appear similar to how it appears in the Explore experience in Looker, although some features (such as linking) aren’t supported by all file types.
• Select Unformatted if you do not want to apply any special formatting of your query results, such as rounding long numbers or adding special characters, that your Looker developers may have put in place. This is often preferred when data is being fed into another tool for processing.

Expand tables to show all rows

This option is available only for PDF formats of dashboard deliveries.

Select the Expand tables to show all rows box to display all rows of any table visualizations in the dashboard — rather than just those rows that display in the dashboard tile thumbnails.

If you do not see the Expand tables to show all rows option when you’ve chosen PDF in the Format field, talk to your Looker admin about installing the appropriate version of the Chromium renderer for your Looker instance.

If your Looker admin has enabled the Render Long Tables Labs feature and the Expand Tables to Show All Rows option is selected, tiles containing table visualizations may look slightly different in delivered PDFs than they do inside Looker. To learn more about the differences, visit the Labs documentation page.

Arrange dashboard tiles in a single column

This option is available only for the PDF and PNG visualization formats of dashboard deliveries. When Slack is selected as the delivery destination only PDFs are supported.

Select the Arrange dashboard tiles in a single column box to format your PDF or your PNG visualization in a single column layout. This layout displays dashboard tiles in a single vertical column. Leave the box unchecked to show the tiles as they are arranged in the dashboard.

Paper size

This option is available only for PDF formats of dashboard deliveries.

You have the option to specify the optimal size and orientation of dashboard PDFs by selecting from the Paper size drop-down menu. Large visualizations or groups of overlapping dashboard tiles may need to be resized to fit cleanly on a PDF page. If you do not see the Paper size option, talk to your Looker admin about installing the latest version of the Chromium renderer for your Looker instance.

Table resolution

This option is available only for the PNG visualization format and when the Arrange dashboard tiles in a single column box is checked.

You can customize the width of your visualization by using the Table resolution drop-down menu. Your width options are:

• Normal: 800 pixels
• Wide: 1680 pixels

For deliveries to email, if you choose Wide and the visualization width exceeds the limit set by your email client, email delivery recipients may need to scroll horizontally to see the entire visualization.

Delivery time zone

By default, Looker uses the time zone associated with your account to determine when to send your data delivery. If you don’t have a time zone associated with your account, Looker uses your Application Time Zone setting.

If you want to specify a different time zone, select the time zone from the drop-down menu. The time zone you select does not affect the data in your Look or dashboard, just the timing of the delivery.

Filters

The Filters tab in the schedule and send window shows any filters applied to the dashboard as well as their values. In this tab, you can edit the values for any existing filters applied to the dashboard and the new values will be applied to the delivery. The dashboard itself will not be affected.

You cannot add filters to your schedule in the Filters tab, only view and edit the values for existing dashboard filters.

For example, you might send regional teams results that are filtered for their states of interest:

If a dashboard filter requires a filter value, you must enter a value in the Filters tab to create or save any edits to the delivery.

When dashboard filters change

Sometimes dashboard filters change after a schedule is created. The table below explains how that affects filters applied to the scheduled deliveries.

Dashboard filters that are renamed in or removed from a dashboard are no longer applied to delivered data. Schedule creators should be aware that renaming or removing filters could cause deliveries to expose unfiltered data.

Using user attribute filters

If your Looker admin has configured user-specific values, called user attributes, and you have edit privileges for a dashboard, you can create a dashboard filter that uses the matches a user attribute filter option. A filter of this type automatically customizes the filter value for each dashboard viewer. With this kind of filter, you can deliver customized results to each delivery’s recipients. To read more about user attributes, visit the User attributes documentation page.

Testing a schedule

If you set the Recurrence field to anything other than Send now, a Test now button appears at the bottom left of the schedule and send window.

Click the Test now button to send a one-time test delivery of the schedule only to yourself. A green checkmark appears to confirm a test has been sent.

Saving a schedule or sending now

If you set the Recurrence field to Send now, click the Send now button at the bottom of the window for a one-time delivery to the listed destination.

If you set the Recurrence field to anything other than Send now, click the Save button to save your schedule and close the window.

Click the Cancel button to exit the window without saving or sending the schedule.

Your saved schedules for a dashboard appear in its existing schedules window. Your saved schedules for all content appear on the Schedules page of your user profile.

Editing a schedule

You can edit only the schedules you have created. To edit a schedule:

1. Click the three-dot menu at the top right of the dashboard.
2. Select Schedule delivery from the drop-down menu.
3. In the existing schedules window, click the three-dot menu that applies to the schedule you would like to edit.
4. Choose Edit from the drop-down menu.
5. The schedule and send window appears for that schedule. Make your edits in this window.
6. Click Save when your edits are complete, or click Cancel to cancel your edits.

Duplicating a schedule

You may want to duplicate a schedule and then edit it. To duplicate a schedule:

1. Click the three-dot menu at the top right of the dashboard.
2. Select Schedule delivery from the drop-down menu.
3. In the existing schedules window, click the three-dot menu that applies to the schedule you would like to edit.
4. Choose Duplicate from the drop-down menu.
5. The schedule and send window appears for the duplicate schedule. “Copy” is appended to the schedule name.
6. Make your edits.
7. Click Save when your edits are complete, or click Cancel to cancel your edits and delete the duplicated schedule.

The original schedule remains unchanged when you make a duplicate.

The filters in a duplicate schedule will be set to the same values as are present in the Filters tab of the original schedule, although you can edit these values. If any filters have changed since the creation of the original schedule, the filters will be affected as shown in the When dashboard filters change section. If a required filter was later added to the dashboard that the original schedule is based on, you need to select a value for that filter before saving the duplicated schedule.

Deleting a schedule

You can delete only the schedules you have created. To delete a schedule:

1. Click the three-dot menu at the top right of the dashboard.
2. Select Schedule delivery from the drop-down menu.
3. In the existing schedules window, click the three-dot menu that applies to the schedule you would like to edit.
4. Choose Delete from the drop-down menu.
5. A new window appears. Click Delete to delete the schedule, or click Cancel to keep the schedule.

You can also delete a schedule from the Schedules page of your user profile.

Scheduling challenges

Looker schedules data deliveries according to the time zone indicated in the Application Time Zone setting on the Admin Settings page, or, if enabled, the schedule creator’s User Specific Time Zone.

At times, a scheduled delivery could fail to reach one or more of its recipients. This could happen if the underlying model has an error, if the recipient does not have access to the data, or if there are rendering problems or page errors. The data destination reports an error if it is unable to connect to the specified endpoint.

If such issues occur, Looker sends an email to notify the schedule’s creator. The email includes a link to the scheduled content, a list of the recipients it failed to reach, and more information, if available, about the problem Looker encountered when trying to reach the recipients.

Delivery considerations for admins

Looker admins can see, edit, reassign, and delete any users’ schedules. Additionally, Looker admins should bear some things in mind when setting up data delivery for their Looker instance and granting users permissions to send or schedule data deliveries. For more information, visit the following documentation pages:

• Admin settings - Schedules
• Admin settings - Schedule History
• Managing business user features
• Roles
• Labs - Render Long Tables