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The Kitchen Table

Explore the product knowledge we've built up together

2115 Topics

Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
Department of Customer LoveLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How do self-hosted users find looker logs?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jul 11, 2017 Step 1: Where to find logsThe standard subdirectories under the Looker user’s home directory (usually /home/looker) are described belowThe logs are inside the log directory. Step 2: What day to getThe current day's log is called looker.log and is currently being written to. The other logs have dates in their filenames.IMPORTANT: If you are downloading your today's log, make a copy of today's log. if you tamper with looker.log in any way then the instance will stop writing log files. This content is subject to limited support.                 

10340
Department of Customer Love
Looker Staff
1 year ago
S
Looker Staff
swhiteLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

tmp directory getting too largeKnowledge Drop

Last tested: May 10, 2019 If your instance is hosted by Looker, the .tmp directory is cleared on startup.If you host your own instance, and this directory gets too large, you can safely delete certain files in .tmp when the instance is shutdown.Admins may want to add something like this to their startup scripts:rm -rf ~/looker/.tmp/jruby* ~/looker/.tmp/looker-tmp* This will clear the .tmp folder of unneeded files on startup. This content is subject to limited support.                 

210
S
Looker Staff
1 year ago
A
Looker Staff
adina.katzLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can I remove the from cache/ last run at time from the top of a dashboard?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jun 25, 2019 Nope. You can vote for this feature request here: Hide staleness time in Dashboards/ last run time/ from cache message This content is subject to limited support.                    

120
A
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Dean_Hicks
Looker Staff
Dean_HicksLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Upload to SFTP host [host] failed due to error: NoMethodError. message: undefined method `write' for nil:NilClassKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Oct 18, 2019 The Problem:Error: Upload to SFTP host [host] failed due to error: NoMethodError. message: undefined method `write' for nil:NilClassTroubleshooting steps:This error can happen when some part of the connection and transferring of data to the SFTP server failed for schedules that send with "All Results" selected. In order to get a better error message, try sending again with "Results in Table" selected.Some good things to check in general for SFTP issues:- Trailing slash on the path - the path should always end in a trailing / and should point to a specific directory on the SFTP server.- Have our IP Addresses been whitelisted on the server?- Did the schedules work previously and broke? Or have they not been able to successfully set up?Also check for a / in the schedule name. This content is subject to limited support.                   

4980
Dean_Hicks
Looker Staff
1 year ago
A
Looker Staff
adina.katzLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

extension: required and validationKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Apr 30, 2019 The extension: required parameter flags an Explore as requiring extension, which means that the Explore cannot be used on its own. The contents and settings of the Explore will only be used when the Explore is extended using the extends parameter in another Explore.What this means in terms of validation: If there are any validation errors in the base explore then these errors will not surface until the explore is extended and the extended explore inherits the errors. Essentially, there are no errors in the base explore until that explore is extended and we don't resolve the error in the extended explore. This content is subject to limited support.                   

170
A
Looker Staff
1 year ago
A
Looker Staff
adina.katzLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

error "orphaned job finalized by Scheduler::Custodian"Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Mar 25, 2019 The custodian was removed in Looker v6.6, so only older versions of Looker will show this message.The custodian ran during the Looker start up process and cleaned up any schedules that haven't completed and have no chance of completing. An example of this is a schedule that is in the "execute" state but there is no query running on the database for this schedule.So that error message indicated that the schedule was cleaned up by the custodian because there was no change of completion. This content is subject to limited support.                   

580
A
Looker Staff
1 year ago
A
Looker Staff
adina.katzLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Why don't I see the gear menu next to the Run button or the three dot menu at the top right corner of the tiles in an embed dashboard?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Apr 22, 2019When the embed user has no permissions for anything that would appear in that menu, the menu is left out. This content is subject to limited support.                   

510
A
Looker Staff
1 year ago
A
Looker Staff
adina.katzLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can I use a Look or Dashboard as my homepage?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Apr 11, 2019 You can use any Looker URL as a homepage. Check it out in docs: https://docs.looker.com/admin-options/settings/homepage This content is subject to limited support.                  

580
A
Looker Staff
1 year ago
A
Looker Staff
adina.katzLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Does a change to a parent PDT cause child PDTs to rebuild?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Sep 30, 2019 Yes. When there is a change to the parent PDT, the child PDTs hash changes and will rebuild with the reason "initial creation". This content is subject to limited support.                   

170
A
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Aleksandrs_Vederniko
Looker Staff
Aleksandrs_VedernikoLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

What does `--scheduler-query-timeout` flag control?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Oct 10, 2018 This is NOT a query timeout for when the query is actually executing. What this is, is the amount of time, once a scheduled job is changed to executing, that it will wait to get a connection to the database, and if it can't get a connection to START the query, then it hits this timeout and fails out.EXAMPLE: So imagine you have a connection pool of 5 set in the connection settings, and I kick off a dashboard with 5 queries that each take 20 minutes to run. Now say a schedule gets kicked off, because the connection pool is full, the query gets queued to get a connection, if it hits scheduler query timeout waiting to get one of those connections, it'll fail.  This content is subject to limited support.                  

780
Aleksandrs_Vederniko
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Aleksandrs_Vederniko
Looker Staff
Aleksandrs_VedernikoLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How to pull Look ID from Look download slugKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Aug 22, 2018 You can find this in System Activity history explore. Assume you have a Look slug in, say, a download page like this: https://instance.looker.com/looks/mNKz7MjnndQrCKFwWP8V2Q4H8gZ57R4p.csvThis is the system activity URL you'll want to use on your instance.https://instance.looker.com/explore/system__activity/history?fields=look.link,look.public_slug&f[look.public]=Yes&sorts=look.link&limit=500&column_limit=50&vis=%7B%7D&filter_config=%7B%22look.public%22%3A%5B%7B%22type%22%3A%22is%22%2C%22values%22%3A%5B%7B%22constant%22%3A%22Yes%22%7D%2C%7B%7D%5D%2C%22id%22%3A0%2C%22error%22%3Afalse%7D%5D%7D&origin=share-expanded Then add a filter on the Public Slug, which is the part that comes before the file extension and after the /looks/. (in this example it's mNKz7MjnndQrCKFwWP8V2Q4H8gZ57R4p ) This content is subject to limited support.                   

3130
Aleksandrs_Vederniko
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Aleksandrs_Vederniko
Looker Staff
Aleksandrs_VedernikoLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How do I edit a dashboard's tiles via the API?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Oct 1, 2019 In the update_dashboard call in the 3.0 API, dashboard_elements array is read-only and cannot be altered, so this call can only be used to edit simple properties of the dashboard, such as the title. However, as of Looker 5.14, there are calls you can make in API 3.1 to edit a dashboard's tiles. Here are the steps you can take:Use the dashboard_dashboard_elements call to get the query information for all of the dashboard elements. Edit the parameters in the query body for each tile you want to edit. Use the create_query call to get a new query id from the edited query information for each tile. Use the update_dashboard_element call on each tile to change it over to the new query id.Besides editing tiles, you can also add and delete tiles via these new endpoints, as well as adjust other dashboard features such as layout and filters. This content is subject to limited support.                  

3140
Aleksandrs_Vederniko
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Aleksandrs_Vederniko
Looker Staff
Aleksandrs_VedernikoLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How to test if Fileshare (NFS/EFS/GFS) is correctly mounted and accessible from all nodes in the clusterKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Apr 3, 2020 run ps -ef|grep java|grep looker from CL on each node. Verify that --shared-storage-dir path is the same on each node.   Test the ability for nodes to write and other nodes to read from the shared storage using path found in step 1. You can do this by creating a file from node1 with touch /mount_path/file.txt For example, if the path to the shared storage directory from step 1 is /lookershare/modelshare , then command will be touch /lookershare/modelshare/file.txt Once you have created a file from node1, try to see in node2 & all other nodes in the cluster can read it with ls -ltr /mount_path/file.txt   Loop through all nodes in the cluster This content is subject to limited support.                   

680
Aleksandrs_Vederniko
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Aleksandrs_Vederniko
Looker Staff
Aleksandrs_VedernikoLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Error starting Looker: Java::JavaLang::ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsExceptionKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Mar 28, 2019 The ErrorWhen trying to start up a self-hosted Looker after an update, the following error is shown:2019-03-26 16:18:14.441 -0400 [ERROR|007d0|db:looker] :: Java::JavaLang::ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 5: SELECT * FROM `setting` WHERE (`key` = 'license_key') LIMIT 12019-03-26 16:18:14.444 -0400 [ERROR|007d0|main] :: Error starting Looker: Java::JavaLang::ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 52019-03-26 16:18:14.490 -0400 [WARN|007d0|ruby:stderr] ::  Possible SolutionsUpdate backend mysqlMySQL 5.6 doesn't work as of for a commit we've implemented, you need to upgrade it to 5.7.(MARIADB) turn off query_cache_typeLooker changed the Mariadb driver to connect to the internal database starting in version 6.4. A similar error is cited here. After checking output of user's show variables & comparing it to ours in master , we noticed that:THEIRS OURSquery_cache_type ON query_cache_type OFF  So in some cases after changing that setting on the Mysql DB side to match ou

660
Aleksandrs_Vederniko
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Aleksandrs_Vederniko
Looker Staff
Aleksandrs_VedernikoLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Chromium rendering under the hoodKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Feb 13, 2019Run all queries for the dashboard and cache them Take the dash/look URL we're supposed to render and prepend/append some URL changes and parameters to open the page in presentation mode and to hide some UI elements Open that URL in headless chromium, wait for it to finish loading Run some JS on that page which resizes the invisible "viewport" to get the vis at the right size and includes a call to `captureScreenshot` which is a method provided by Chrome Devtools Protocol Take that image data, send it over to the looker codebase, convert it to the proper image format and deliver (there's a lot more complexity there but that's the gist of it)   This content is subject to limited support.                  

420
Aleksandrs_Vederniko
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Aleksandrs_Vederniko
Looker Staff
Aleksandrs_VedernikoLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can we turn off ERROR reporting mechanism that tries to send information to sentry?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Dec 24, 2018 Yes, if you host your own instance you can turn it off with the --no-report-backend-errors and --no-report-frontend-errors startup flags in the lookerstart.cfg file.Docs  This content is subject to limited support.                   

430
Aleksandrs_Vederniko
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Aleksandrs_Vederniko
Looker Staff
Aleksandrs_VedernikoLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

ERROR: SAML login failedKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Feb 4, 2019 One of the reasons when users all of the sudden cannot login into Looker using their SSO SAML credentials, could be as simple as running out of space on the machine housing Looker app.what that could look like in logs:[WARN|461eb2|cache] :: Error writing cache entry for 744927ea4758e179f895938bda89bde1ab3a23ac. No space left on device - /home/looker/looker/.cache/744927ea4758e179f895938bda89bde1ab3a23ac.ruby_bin.kSCbqKr2.tmpThe solution would be to either free up some space or mount a bigger drive.  This content is subject to limited support.                   

300
Aleksandrs_Vederniko
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Aleksandrs_Vederniko
Looker Staff
Aleksandrs_VedernikoLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How can I set up monitoring of my Looker instance's health via the API?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Oct 5, 2018 Looker responds to /alive with an http 200 status code if it is up. This can be used for load balancers and such to do health checks. We recently added /availability which does the same thing, but exercises more of Looker's internals while also returning a human readable page. It will say "Looker is up" if all is well. This content is subject to limited support.                  

530
Aleksandrs_Vederniko
Looker Staff
1 year ago
andrew.rose
Looker Staff
andrew.roseLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Can I enable SSL for a connection to a MySQL internal DB?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Jan 18, 2019If you host your own instance, yes, you can. In the looker-db file that contains information about the MySQL connection, add the line "ssl: true" to enable SSL. This content is subject to limited support.                   

280
andrew.rose
Looker Staff
1 year ago
andrew.rose
Looker Staff
andrew.roseLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How do I calculate the number of digits in a value using table calcs?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: May 18, 2020 We can do this using the power of logarithms! Looker's log() function uses log base 10, so it will return an integer for each value that is a power of 10 - eg. log(1) = 0, log(10) = 1, and so on. So, for integer values of log(x), we can return "log(x) + 1". For all other values, we can round up using the ceiling() function.Here's the syntax:if((ceiling(log(${value})) - log(${value})) < 0.00000001, log(${value})+1, ceiling(log(${value})))One fun thing to note - all of these functions can be used in a custom dimension as well! This content is subject to limited support.                   

430
andrew.rose
Looker Staff
1 year ago
andrew.rose
Looker Staff
andrew.roseLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How do I reference SAML groups by their AccountName values when setting up SAML authentication using Azure Active Directory?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Sep 17, 2020 The ProblemBy default, when setting up SAML auth with Azure AD, the SAML groups are brought into Looker by their GUID values. This makes each group name into a long, ugly hash, instead of a human-readable name.A SolutionOne user mentioned that they were able to get Looker to use other formats for their SAML groups in ActiveDirectory - here's the process they used:In Azure AD go to Azure Active Directory > Enterprise Applications > New Application (at the top) > Non-gallery application (at the top) Type the name in (i.e. Looker – Production), and click Add Go to Properties in the new Enterprise Application, enable users for sign-in, disable user assignment required, disable visible to users Go to Single Sign-On section, select SAML Edit the basic SAML configuration, set Identifier to whatever (i.e.https://somenonexistentdomain.biz), set the Reply URL to https://<your_looker_server>:9999/samlcallback, and click Save Edit the User Attributes &

3500
andrew.rose
Looker Staff
1 year ago
A
Looker Staff
anouk.muisLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Setup Git Connection with Google Cloud Source RepositoriesKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Mar 30, 2020 Go the Configure Git settings in your Looker Instance For Repository URL put in the URL of the repository you want to use starting with ssh://... You can generate this by clicking Clone and selecting SSH Authentication in your Cloud Source Repositories. Make sure to cut off the 'git clone ' bit from the link. It should have a format like the below ssh://<USERNAME>@source.developers.google.com:2022/p/<PROJECT NAME>/r/<REPOSITORY NAME>   For Git Hosting Service select 'Custom Git Configuration' and click continue Copy the SSH key that Looker generates in the next screen for you.  In Cloud Source Repositories open the Manage SSH Keys page, click Register SSH key. Here you give the key a unique name and paste the key value from Looker and click Register. Once the key is registered you go back to your Looker instance and click Test and Finalize Setup. This content is subject to limited support.                   

6150
A
Looker Staff
1 year ago
Annie_He
Looker Staff
Annie_HeLooker Staff
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Why are color indicators not appearing in the IDE when I add a new file or make a code change?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: Oct 21, 2020 Typically, we'll see a blue dot when we add a new file to the project. Or we'll see green blocks in the files themselves when there's a code change.If we're not seeing either, the project likely doesn't have a git repo set up for it yet. This content is subject to limited support.                   

70
Annie_He
Looker Staff
1 year ago
brecht
Former Looker
brechtFormer Looker
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

Using Looker on AWS CloudFormationKnowledge Drop

Last tested: Feb 20, 2019 At the moment, we don't have any formal docs written up on using CloudFormation.The easiest would be to create a linux host, get it all setup by following our installation guide, then create an AMI from it, and create a CloudFormation template to launch a host using that template. However, there might be some difficulties with the data Looker stores on the local disk here when you're migrating an existing Looker implementation (see below). If you're starting with a blank implementation of Looker, the requirements are softer.For migrating Looker implementations, the looker.jar and the looker startup script are stored on the local drive, plus possibly lookerstart.cfg and a db credentials file if you're using MySQL as the internal database. If you're not using MySQL, you'll be on HyperSQL as internal database for which the file system is stored locally and contains the running state and config of looker. There are also ssh keys and models directories (the full di

650
brecht
Former Looker
1 year ago
brecht
Former Looker
brechtFormer Looker
published in Technical Tips & Tricks

How do I de-select all series on a chart?Knowledge Drop

Last tested: May 13, 2020 Option + Click on a series in the legend will deselect everything except that series.You can find more Looker keyboard shortcuts in this post This content is subject to limited support.                    

1350
brecht
Former Looker
1 year ago

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