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Looker App Guide

Learn how to set up Fugo’s Looker app to securely display the data dashboards that are central to your teams’ workflows.

Sarah avatar
Written by Sarah
Updated over a week ago

Table of contents:

🔈 Important update as of May 2024

Looker recently made the decision to only support the last 2 versions of most major browsers, including Chrome. That is, at any given time now and in the future, Looker will only support the current Chrome version & the one that preceded it.

That means if you want to use our Looker app on your screens, you'll need to run Fugo on a device that has or can update to the latest Chrome browser version.

You can check for the latest Chrome version here.

If your player already supports the latest Chrome, you should be good to go!

If it doesn't, you'll either need to update the Chrome browser to the latest version (if your player has this capability), or get a device that supports it. A Fugo Player or any Chromebox make great options.

If your browser version is still too old to support Looker but you don't want to invest in new hardware, you can also consider using Looker with our TV Dashboards feature instead of the app.

If you're seeing a blank screen where your Looker app used to be displayed, your device may have been affected by this policy. Please reach out to us in the chat box or at support@fugo.ai for help.


Fugo & your Looker data

Stories are lurking within your data silos. Stories that can drive successful outcomes for your business across your teams - Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, Accounts, Logistics, Finance, Product… the data is all there.

Looker’s data visualizations allow you to pull out those stories via collated dashboards which you can now display in conference rooms, warehouses, storerooms, sales offices, or wherever you need quick and central access to your data - which becomes expensive and difficult to distribute with a login tool.

Fugo’s Looker app gives you the ability to securely integrate data visualization from your Looker dashboards into your digital signage, without making sensitive data public.

Combine your screens and data to help your teams do their jobs and understand the business better - with Fugo’s Looker app 😎

💡 Note: in addition to Fugo's native Looker integration, you can also use our TV Dashboards feature to display your Looker dashboards on screen. You can find instructions for using that here.

You might want to try this option if you're using a player with a Chrome browser version Looker no longer supports (see our note at the top of the guide).


A note on optimizing your dashboards for TV displays

When you're planning to display your dashboards on screen, it's important to think about how people will be viewing your screen. Remember that your audience is often viewing your content from far away, so the dashboards you put on display should be optimized for that.

Meaning - large dashboards with many data points, charts, and graphs are going to be hard for your audience to see and understand. What you can read on your desktop computer won't necessarily translate on screen.

Having less data per dashboard can also help with slow load times on screen.

We recommend optimizing your dashboards for screen before setting up Looker with Fugo. That might mean creating more, smaller dashboards with fewer data (a good rule of thumb is to include 3 data points per dashboard - whether that's graphs, charts, or what have you.) The less overwhelming the dashboard is visually, the higher the uptake will be from your audience!

You can also use our Design Studio tools to crop & customize the app so it displays better on screen. More on that below.


💡 Note: If you want to see your Looker dashboard on screen at the end of configuration, make sure it's connected to Fugo CMS. If you haven’t connected your screen(s) yet, you can find the instructions for your preferred device in our hardware collection.


How to configure the Looker app in Fugo

Let's dive into how to get started with Fugo & Looker!

There are two ways to add content with Fugo - via our playlist builder and in our Design Studio. We’ll cover the steps for both methods in each section.

Using the playlist builder

1. Log into your Fugo Account. If you don’t have an account yet, you can start your 14-day free trial here.

2. Click Apps in the top navigation bar to get to our app store.

3. Locate the Looker app (you can search for it to move things along) and click Try App.

Note that the Looker app is a Premium app, meaning that it's available on the Core & Enterprise plans only.

4. A window will pop up where you'll be prompted to either create a new playlist for the app or add the app to an existing playlist.

Choose how you'd like to proceed and & click Continue.

5. Now you're ready to configure the app.

You'll need to copy & paste some credentials from your Looker account into Fugo, so go ahead & sign into Looker in a new browser tab.

6. First, copy your homepage URL.

And then back in Fugo - paste it into the API HOST field of the app. We'll automatically paste it over into the UI Host field too since these will most likely be the same.

❗ If you run into issues with the connection after setting up your Looker app, or if your configuration isn’t the standard setup (for instance, if you’re using a proxy or a cluster), your API Host URL might be different from your UI Host URL.

You can verify that you’re using the correct API Host URL in the API Admin Settings screen - read more about that here.

7. Next you’ll need to create a Client ID and Client Secret to use in the Fugo app.

So go back to your Looker account and go to Admin > Users from the left hand settings panel.

8. Find the user you want to create an ID and click on them to open their profile.

9. On the user’s profile page, click the Edit Keys button next to API Keys.

This will open a new tab where you can edit the user’s API3 Keys.

10. Click New API Key.

11. Copy the Client ID for the new API Key you just created and paste it into the CLIENT ID field in the Fugo app.

12. Next, reveal & copy the Client Secret for your API and paste it into the SECRET field in the Fugo app and click Next.

13. Your Looker dashboards should now load in a drop-down menu in the right-hand settings panel.

Choose the one you want to display.

14. If you have a particularly long dashboard and you want it to scroll on screen, toggle on the ENABLE SCROLL option.

You may need to set the scroll height (in pixels) by trial & error.

15. Set the duration of the app - that is, how long the app displays within a slideshow of other content - in the DURATION (SECONDS) field.

Click Save Changes when you're done.

16. Your Looker app instance will now be listed as a slide in your playlist.

If you want to display one or several more dashboards, you'll need to create a new instance of the app for each dashboard by clicking Add More Content and configuring more instances of the app.

💡 By default, apps & other slide content configured in the playlist builder will fill the full dimensions of the screen & play as a standard slideshow - one after the other.

If you want to customize the look and feel of your dashboards (by, say, adding a ticker text or local time, etc) to your Looker slide, you can do that in the Design Studio. We'll cover that in the next section: Using the Design Studio.

To continue on to publishing instructions from here, you can skip to section 3: How to publish the app to your screen/s.


Using the Design Studio

1. Click Studio in the top navigation bar. Then click Create in Studio to start a new design.

2. This will open up a blank canvas for you to start adding content to! To add the Fugo app, either scroll to find it in the Apps menu to the right or search for it to find it faster.

3. Click the app or drag and drop to add it onto your canvas.

💡 You can drag the sizing handles of the app around to change the size. Make it smaller so you can split your screen and add other content, or make it full screen - that’s totally up to you!

4. Customizing the Looker app settings works the same way in the Design Studio - all settings will be found in the panel to the left. To bring up the panel, click on the app from the canvas.

You can continue to customize your content however you wish in the studio! Some ideas to customize this might be:

  • Add your company logo the slide

  • Crop the app to visually highlight key parts of your dashboard

  • Add text boxes and scrolling ticker texts with important messages, reminders, or requests pertaining to your dashboards or data initiatives

  • ​Add QR codes to your display to create calls to action for your colleagues pertaining to your dashboards or workflows

  • Incorporate other apps & integrations into the display, such as the World Clock app or CNN app to grab attention with live updating headlines

In my example, I've customized my slide to display a cropped version of my Looker app along with a QR code CTA and local weather conditions for my on-the-go employees in the shipping center.

When you’re satisfied with how your content looks, click Save and Close. This will close out the design studio. To publish this content, you’ll need to add it to a playlist, which we’ll cover in the next section.


How to publish the app to your screen/s

Note: If you want to add content you created in the studio to a playlist, you’ll need to navigate to the Playlists page by clicking Playlists in the top navigation bar and Create Playlist to start a new playlist.

That's where we'll pick up our instructions below.

1. Give your playlist a name (we suggest making it something relevant to distinguish it from other playlists later on down the road.) I'll call mine "Shipping Operations Tracker - Warehouse Zone 1"

2. Click Select Screens to choose where to publish your playlist. You can publish this playlist to one, or multiple screens.

3. If you used the playlist builder to configure the app, you'll already see it listed under the Content for your playlist.

If you used the Studio to configure the app, you'll need to click Select Content and select it from the Studio Content tab in content picker.

3. You can also add more content to your playlist by clicking Add More Content and choosing other apps, uploading media, or from the content that you created in the studio.

4. When you've selected all the content items you want to add to this playlist, you're ready to put it on screen or schedule it!

Click Preview it to see what it will look like on screen.

To publish it to screen right away, click Publish. This is will send it to your screen/s right away & play it indefinitely until you unpublish it.

To save it & come back to later, click Finish later.

To get specific about what dates, days, and times this playlist runs, you can use the Schedule. Learn more about scheduling capabilities in our playlists collection.

How often will my dashboard refresh on screen?

Once configured & published to screen/s - there's no manual intervention you need to do to set a refresh interval or update your dashboard in Looker. Fugo will automatically fetch the latest data each time your app comes up within the content rotation.


Need more help?

Did this guide answer all of your questions? If not, or if you have any feedback for us, feel free to drop our support team an email at support@fugo.ai - we're always happy to help out.

You can also book in a dashboard support call with our engineering team here if you need some help getting this feature set up.

Happy publishing!

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