Can I temporarily stop or pause a scheduled look or dashboard from going out?

Knowledge Drop

Last Tested: Oct 2, 2020

Not natively in the product, but there is a feature request.

Basic Workaround

In order to stop a scheduled look or dashboard, the user has to delete it entirely from the schedules tab in the admin pane. They would then need to recreate the schedule when they want it back.

Alternative Basic Workaround

Through the update_schedule_plan() endpoint, we can set the "enabled'"parameter to "false". This disables the schedule, without fully deleting it. It tells Looker to skip over any possible runs for this schedule - the only nuance with this method is that if we did skip over any runs while it was disabled, when we enable this again it will run once (no matter how many skipped runs happen) right away.

Other Workaround

If you host your own instance, you can restart looker with startup flag options to stop schedules -
--scheduler-threads=0 will disable the scheduler -
BUT once you bring it back, the backlogged schedules will need to run

Another workaround we can try is using a dummy datagroup with a static sql_trigger, so that the value never changes, and trigger the schedule on this datagroup. Or, we can set it to only send if results (if the results aren't changing).

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Comments
lantrann
Staff

I wrote an example script using the Looker API (the second workaround in this article). Click here

Meydan
New Member

Change the sending method to Slack or something that is not connected (it will save your setting also like recipients email, hour etc.)

tijsbronnenberg
New Member

A different work around is to temporarily set the sync to a monthly delivery frequency, and hence make sure it won’t sync while working on it (provided that you work on it for less than a month). Then simply change it back once you’re done.

Version history
Last update:
‎04-05-2021 09:06 AM
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