Looker

Connecting Looker to Tallyfy Analytics

Looker connects to Tallyfy Analytics through Amazon Athena, letting you build interactive dashboards from your workflow data. Your whole team can click, filter, and drill into process performance - no SQL required.

Looker vs Looker Studio

This covers both Looker (Google Cloud’s enterprise BI platform) and Looker Studio (free visualization tool, formerly Google Data Studio). Both connect to Tallyfy Analytics through Amazon Athena using different methods. Pick whichever fits your needs and budget.

What you can build

• Interactive exploration - Filter and drill down through workflow data without writing queries
• Embedded dashboards - Share live analytics with people who don’t need full BI access
• Real-time monitoring - Watch processes unfold with dashboards that update as work happens
• Executive overviews - Give leadership a high-level view with drill-down into details
• Bottleneck detection - Spot slowdowns in your processes before they become problems
• Compliance reporting - Prove SLA compliance with timestamp evidence

How the connection works

Layer	Role
Tallyfy Analytics	Your process data stored in Amazon S3
Amazon Athena1	Query engine that runs SQL on your data lake
Simba JDBC driver	Connects Looker to Athena
Looker	Build models, create visualizations, embed dashboards

Authentication

When Tallyfy provisions your Analytics account, you’ll get two credential sets:

• AWS IAM Login (username/password) - For AWS web console access only
• Access Key and Secret Access Key - What Looker actually needs for the connection

Important

Looker needs the Access Key and Secret Access Key - not the IAM username/password. Token-based authentication works better with BI platforms and avoids “security token invalid” errors.

Performance tips

• Result streaming - Enable streaming for large result sets to improve extraction speed
• Persistent derived tables - Cache complex calculations in S3 for faster dashboard loading
• Connection pooling - Increase concurrent connections if Looker is your primary analytics tool
• Aggregate awareness - Pre-calculate common metrics so dashboards load faster

Understanding time metrics

Task duration metrics in Looker show elapsed time between assignment and completion - not actual working time. These timestamps include holidays, multi-tasking periods, and external delays. For accurate effort tracking, see how to track time spent on tasks.

Getting started

Looker (enterprise) - takes about 15-20 minutes:

1. Confirm you have an active Tallyfy Analytics subscription
2. Verify you have Looker access (self-hosted or Looker Cloud)
3. Gather your Access Key and Secret Access Key from Tallyfy
4. Follow the connection guide below

Looker Studio (free) - takes about 10-15 minutes:

1. Confirm you have an active Tallyfy Analytics subscription
2. Sign up for a free Looker Studio account
3. Choose a third-party connector (CData or OWOX)
4. Configure the connector with your Athena credentials

• Connecting Looker Studio to analytics data
• Connecting Looker to analytics data

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Footnotes

1. AWS serverless query service using standard SQL on S3 data lakes, no infrastructure management needed ↩

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