How do I migrate dashboards between instances?

sam8 · ‎04-05-2021

Knowledge Drop

Last Tested: March 21, 2021

Here are three options:

Make all the UDDs into LookML dashboards, connect the Git repo to the new instance, and then make the LookML dashboards back into UDDs. This Help Center article outlines the manual steps.
Use Gazer, a command line tool that migrates content between instances.
Please note that this tool is open source and it is not supported by Looker’s normal support channels. It may be possible to purchase support from Looker’s Professional Services team. We are hoping that a community will grow around this tool, however, and support/enhance it further.
Issues can be logged at https://github.com/deangelo-llooker/gzr/issues.
Clone the instance's internal database completely. This brings in and overwrites all dashboards, Looks, users, folders, and everything that's stored in the internal database. It's recommended to only use this option when you want to migrate all the content and metadata from one instance to another. One use case for this is when setting up a new staging or QA instance.

This content is subject to limited support.

Balder · ‎10-20-2021

About alternative 1, will it include other dependencies as well (eg. color sheme)?

sam8 · ‎10-20-2021

@Balder the “Get dashboard LookML” option will only bring over information specific to that dashboard. So for example, it will bring over color schemes from the embed settings (since that is specific to that dashboard). It will also bring over references to themes, but you’ll need to make sure the corresponding theme is set up on the Admin page on the target instance.

adityab · ‎03-11-2022

Hi, I am new to Looker BI. I have done some self learning from Udemy on development.

Can someone please walk me through the end to end migration steps needed to move the dashboards from Development environment to UAT environment in simple words?