Looker Studio Pro: Discover your insights

What is Looker Studio?

Looker Studio, previously referred to as Data Studio, represents an enterprise business intelligence (BI) solution provided by Google Cloud. The Looker Studio platform provides clients with access to more than 600 data sources and a diverse collection of controlled data.

What are the benefits?

Looker Studio Pro is a new paid version of Looker Studio that provides enterprise user management features, team collaboration features, support, and SLAs.

Looker Studio Pro enables businesses to rely on Looker Studio with SLAs and support and Improve team collaboration with team workspaces. It also enables them to have better visibility into how Looker Studio dashboards relate to BigQuery tables.

Introducing Team Workspaces: Enhance Collaboration and Streamline Onboarding

This innovative and collaborative sharing model empowers users to easily share assets on a larger scale, fostering improved teamwork and simplifying onboarding. With team workspaces, you gain access to granular permissions and new roles, enabling seamless management of content and team members within dedicated workspaces.

The feature is modeled on shared drives in Google Drive. A new team workspace can be created in Looker Studio, and reports and data sources can be added to the workspace.

Additionally, Looker Studio Pro eliminates the need to transfer ownership of assets when employees leave. Looker Studio Pro content is owned by the organization and managed by Google Cloud Platform.

Google Cloud Project Linking (Looker Studio Pro feature)

With Google Cloud Project Linking, Cloud Identity administrators gain the ability to access and oversee all assets created within your organization. Admins can now manage asset permissions at the organizational level using IAM, granting enhanced control and security.

This feature eliminates the need for ownership transfers when an employee departs from the company, particularly for reports or data sources (assets) that the employee had created. By doing so, it ensures greater reliability of the product and simplifies asset management.

Traditionally, every asset was associated with the user who initially created it. However, when a user account is deleted—for instance, when an employee leaves a Cloud Identity organization—all the assets linked to that user account would be deleted as well.

(This follows the same model as Google Workspace).

When a user in a Cloud Identity organization creates a report or data source, it belongs to the organization. According to the IAM model, assets are not deleted when a user account is deleted or a user leaves the organization.

Looker Studio Pro assets, on the other hand, are organized hierarchically, with your Cloud Identity or Google Workspace organization as the ultimate owner. Organizational ownership ensures that your Looker Studio assets continue to work even if their individual owner leaves the organization. The diagram below represents an example Google Cloud resource hierarchy in its complete form:

To see the individual IAM permissions that each role includes, visit IAM permissions reference.

Lineage of data in Dataplex (Looker Studio Pro feature)

We’re integrating Looker Studio Pro with Dataplex so administrators can better understand how people in their company are using it. With Dataplex, you can see how Looker Studio and BigQuery connect, run impact analyses, and transform data before using it in reports. Looker Studio and Dataplex integration is currently in private preview, so contact your account team for more information.

SLA & Support (Looker Studio Pro feature)

Looker Studio Pro now offers SLAs and support through standard Google Cloud support channels.

24×7 support so you can rely on Looker Studio Pro for business-critical reporting
Existing Google Cloud support packages will include Looker Studio Pro
99.9% availability SLA for Looker Studio Pro

Looker Studio (free) continues to only offer community/forum-based support. Support SLAs are based on the customer’s Google Cloud support package. The customer must have an existing support package to get support for Looker Studio Pro.