Why can't I access chat?

Knowledge Drop

Last tested: April 2021

If you don't see the chat option in the Help Menu:

Permissions: Anyone with the develop permission can come on chat. This means that admins have this capability too. Check if the user is missing the develop permission.

License type: If you have a partner license type you will not have chat access starting April 1st 2021. As for trials, trials which were initiated after Jan 5th 2021 will not have chat feature toggled on. However, the trials that were initiated before that are being turned off in a phased manner.

Closed ports: If your Looker instance is customer-hosted, then your network administrator needs to open several ports on your server to connect to the chat client.

If you see the chat option in the Help Menu, but clicking on it doesn't bring up the chat widget:

Browser extensions:
If you do not see the chat option in the help menu, but clicking it does not bring up the chat widget, check in incognito mode. Often times we've seen extensions such as Ghostery cause issues with the chat window not showing up in the past.

Firewalls: There could be something in your network blocking the Zendesk domain. Besides firewalls, you can check if there is anything else in the network (VPNs, proxies, etc.) that could be blocking the request for the chat widget.

Looker version: Chat is no longer available for customers on version 6.10 or earlier because of an old mechanism those versions used for the chat widget that has since been deprecated by Zendesk.

This content is subject to limited support.                

Comments

Updating this to address Looker Version updates.

From our docs here.

Who can access Looker Support?
Looker Support is available to administrators and developers on your Looker instance. This allows us to focus on your most involved users, who may need in-depth help with the Looker product. You should develop your own internal process for helping your users, especially because you'll know the ins and outs of your data better than anyone.

Chat support is available on Looker instances that are running an officially supported Looker version. Looker-hosted instances automatically update to supported releases. If your Looker instance is customer-hosted, and running an unsupported Looker version, update your Looker instance to a supported Looker version to gain access to chat support.

In the supported releases page it shows that we currently support 22.0, however check that page for the currently supported versions as it will change naturally as we push out new versions.

The chat option also does not show up while sudoing as another user.

Version history
Last update:
‎04-05-2021 09:03 AM
Updated by: