Looker, the business intelligence platform Google LLC acquired in a $2.6 billion deal this year, today received new analytics features and a native mobile app for viewing data on the go.

Looker turns raw business information into visualization dashboards that workers can understand at a glance. It has emerged as an important component of Google’s public cloud portfolio since the deal closed. Looker complements the search giant’s other analytics services and also plays into its multicloud strategy by providing features that let customers visualize data from external platforms such as Microsoft Corp.’s Azure.

Today’s update aims to make Looker dashboards more useful, as well as faster, through a couple of key improvements.

One is a feature dubbed cross-filtering. A Looker dashboard will often include multiple individual graphs, for instance a pie chart showing a company’s quarterly sales figures and a map that breaks down sales by state. With cross-filtering, when a worker adjusts the pie chart to only show sales data from the last quarter, the accompanying map will be automatically reconfigured to display only the most recent quarter’s figures.

The feature is joined by an under-the-hood enhancement dubbed aggregation awareness. It reduces the time Looker dashboards take to perform calculations such as finding the average number of new customers acquired per state in the past quarter. If a calculation was performed once before and the results are stored in a company’s database, Looker will fetch those prepared results instead of performing the calculation from scratch.

The Google unit announced the enhancements at its virtual Join@Home event today, where it also introduced more ways for users to interact with its platform. For one, a new app for Android and iOS provides the ability to view dashboards on the go without having to open a mobile browser.

An expanded Slack integration, in turn, will allow users to receive notifications inside the team chat service when a Looker dashboard registers certain events. For example, administrators could create an alert that notifies them in Slack if a dashboard tracking server performance suddenly shows a big drop. 

“We heard from customers that you love our alerting feature, but need more dynamic ways to notify teams of important data changes, especially while on the go,” wrote Pedro Arellano, director of Looker product marketing at Google Cloud. “This helps you and your teams stay more closely connected to your data, regardless of whether or not you’re inside the Looker platform.”

Looker is also adding features for developers. It’s rolling out a library of packaged interface components into beta to reduce the amount of coding involved in embedding Looker dashboards into external applications.

Image: Google