Maintaining a single source of truth is the hallmark of a successful Business Intelligence implementation. With the release of Looker’s new Content certification feature, organizations now have a native, visual way to signal to users which dashboards and Explores have been vetted for accuracy and compliance.
To help you roll this out effectively, we’ve compiled three core best practices to ensure your certification process is scalable, trusted, and transparent.
1. Establish a centralized process document
The most critical step in launching certification is ensuring your content creators know exactly how to get their work across the finish line. Before enabling content certification in Looker, create a centralized document for your organization that captures the following:
- The point of contact (POC): Identify which certifiers (subject matter experts) are responsible for specific departments or data domains (e.g., Finance, Marketing, or HR).
- Process overview: Provide a clear, step-by-step guide on how a creator should request a review.
- The bar for certification: Define the criteria a content must meet. Example:
- Consistent naming conventions.
- Completed descriptions for all dashboards, tiles and fields.
- Adherence to UI/UX standards (e.g., color palettes and layout).
Pro Tip: Add this document to the Certification Process URL in your Looker Admin settings. This ensures it is displayed directly within the content details pane, removing friction for creators seeking a review.
2. Leverage auto-certification for LookML content
Certification isn’t just for user-generated dashboards. It’s also available for Dashboards, Looks, LookML Dashboards, and Explores.
If your organization has a robust version-control process where LookML content is already well-governed and peer-reviewed via Git, consider auto-certifying your LookML-based content. This allows your data team to focus their manual certification efforts on user-generated content (like UDDs and self-service explores), where risk of logic errors or “content bloat” is naturally higher.
3. Configure auto-revoke settings for maximum trust
A certification badge is only valuable if users trust it. By default, Looker is designed to protect that trust by automatically revoking the certified badge if major edits are made to a piece of content (such as adding a new chart or modifying a query in a dashboard).
Admins have the option to disable this in the settings to allow for a more manual workflow, where the certification persists through edits until a certifier chooses to manually revoke it. Many organizations may prefer to keep auto-revoke enabled, which ensures that any critical content undergoing significant changes automatically loses its badge, preventing outdated or broken logic from appearing as if it still carries a verified status.
Content certification in Looker is a powerful tool for scaling data literacy. By defining your process early, automating processes where governance already exists, and using auto-revoke to maintain high standards, you can ensure your users always know where to find the data they can trust. For more information, see our documentation.