Data-driven organizations often struggle with inconsistent metrics due to a lack of shared definitions, conflicting business logic, and an ever-growing number of outdated data extracts. This can lead to KPIs that don’t match, which can erode trust and threaten a thriving data culture, when teams can’t agree on basic metrics like monthly active users or pipeline growth. By defining metrics once and using them everywhere, you can improve time to insight and help reduce risk, which can result in better governance, security, and cost control.

A decade ago, Looker’s innovative semantic model helped advance the modern business intelligence (BI) industry, and today, we’re using that intelligent engine to create a single source of truth for your business — a standalone metrics layer Google call Looker Modeler, available in preview in Q2.

By defining metrics and storing them in Looker Modeler, metrics can be consumed everywhere, including across popular BI tools such as Connected Sheets, Looker Studio, Looker Studio Pro, Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, and ThoughtSpot. Looker Modeler also works across cloud databases, querying the freshest data available, avoiding the need to manage data extracts, and helping to minimize the risk of insights and reports (including those that impact financial decisions) being days or weeks out of date.

Looker Modeler expands upon the data collaboration and analysis capabilities users have come to expect from the Looker family over the last decade. Models can be shared with coworkers, and new LookML drafts can be submitted for review from the company’s central data team. The result is consistent accessible metrics that can define data relationships and progress against business priorities for a wide variety of use cases. Companies can define the business representation of their data in a semantic layer, without requiring users to have direct access to the underlying database, avoiding disruptions in the event of changes to related infrastructure.  

In addition to the direct integrations with several popular visualization tools, Looker Modeler offers a new SQL interface that allows tools that speak SQL to connect to Looker via JDBC. This new capability is another step toward our vision of making Looker the most open BI platform, bringing trusted data to all types of users through the tools they already use. By reaching users where they use their data, organizations can create data-driven workflows and custom applications that help promote the development of a stronger data culture, drive operational efficiency, and foster innovation.