This guide will walk you through how to set up SYNQ integration with Looker. We connect to Looker via API (to fetch the structure of your Looker objects) and via git (to fetch lookML) models. As a result, we can create a complete picture of your Looker setup and connect it to your data warehouse and dbt models.

To finish this guide, you’ll need the following:
→ Admin permissions for Looker
→ Access to GitHub or GitLab
→ Admin Access to your Looker repository (only repo admins can add deploy keys)

⏱️ Estimated time to finish: 15 minutes.

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Integration

The optimal way to setup is an API key with admin role permissions, which would give SYNQ the necessary permissions to fetch all observability data to reconstruct end-to-end lineage of your Looker objects.

In case you are limited by security policies to provide Admin-level access, we also offer an admin-less integration using a CLI tool. Reach out to us in our shared Slack channel to set this up.

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Setup guide

Follow the Looker access and LookML access guides below to set up the Looker integration.

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Looker access

To process your Looker data, we need access to your Looker instance. SYNQ connects to Looker with clientId and clientSecret, which is bound to a user with Admin permissions.

  1. Go to Admin > Users and create a new user with Add User
    1. Use synq@<your-domain>.com as email address
    2. Disable Send setup emails and Save
    3. Give the user the Admin role

  1. Edit the synq@<your-domain>.com user and create clientId and clientSecret API permissions (see Looker integration docs for details).
    1. click Edit Keys
    2. click New API Key

  1. In SYNQ, you’ll need your instance base URL (https://<your-account>.cloud.looker.com), clientId, and clientSecret securely to complete the integration.

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LookML Access

To process LookML models, we need access to the underlying Looker repository. The Git integration has to be setup as a separate step and can be done in SYNQ: https://app.synq.io/settings/integrations/git. The process executes in two phases:

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1. Collect information about your repo

  1. Repository URL—The full URL of the git repository that contains your Looker project (we support both HTTPS and SSH URLs).
  2. Branches to analyze (default: master and main)—SYNQ, by default, analyses master and main branches. Please provide the name if you prefer us to process the code from any other branch. We support multiple branches too.
  3. Path to analyze (default: .)—SYNQ, by default, looks for your LookML source code in the root of the repository. If you store your code in a subdirectory, please provide us with a path if your Looker project uses a subdirectory. In most cases, it is best to leave this to use default to analyze everything in the repository.

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2. Setup Deployment Key

To finish the setup, you will have to store the public part of the SYNQ deployment key with your git provider. You can follow the instructions based on your git provider below: