Organizations need direct, immediate access to operational health and market signals. To fast track insight generation for database administration and marketing analysts, we are releasing two new blocks on the Looker Marketplace: Operational Intelligence for AlloyDB and Google Trends.
Observe AlloyDB performance
The Operational Intelligence for AlloyDB block provides database observability directly in your Looker instance. DBAs and analysts can monitor instance health, analyze query execution patterns, and identify resource bottlenecks without installing third-party monitoring agents.
This block uses a decoupled architecture by connecting Looker to your administrative database rather than the production instance. The built-in LookML dashboard uses three sections: Performance Overview, Bottleneck Analysis, and Pulse AlloyDB Trends. Performance Overview focuses on query volume, total compute load, cache hit ratio, transaction throughput etc to provide a high level snapshot of the database health and system stability. Bottleneck Analysis handles slowest query list, executive time vs total calls, and query inspectors, pointing you to queries that need index optimizations. Pulse AlloyDB Trends tracks historical performance, storage, and workload attribution over time. Additionally, you can write refinements in your project’s LookML files to override default thresholds to customize the dashboard for your use case.
Blend publishing search trends with your business data
The Google Trends block connects your Looker instance to the public Google Trends dataset. It can help you to track search term popularity, compare regional interests, and compute trend velocity.
You can join this public search trend with your first party data to enrich your dataset and make better informed decisions. For example, you can extend trends view in the model to correlate rising search terms with your inventory levels or product page views.
Exploring Headless BI with agents
Looker’s semantic layer lets business users bypass static dashboards in traditional BI user interfaces and query data in plain language in their interface of choice. Users can receive instant, context-aware summaries and insights that accelerate the speed of business decisions.
Looker’s managed MCP server lets AI agents like Gemini and Claude query your LookML models. As the agents don’t have to write raw SQL or guess table structure, your natural language queries to agents produce precise and dependable results, all while enforcing your LookML business logic, your underlying data security permissions, and your data governance model. With solutions like embedded Conversational Analytics and custom solutions with the Conversational Analytics API, your users can gain insights from these blocks from a variety of end-user interfaces without being bound to your BI application’s UI.
To get started with these new blocks:
- From your Looker instance, click Marketplace in the nav menu.
- In the search bar, type “AlloyDB Operational Intelligence” or “Google Trends”.
- Select the block and click Install.
- Follow the prompts.