Creating an Automated Report Registry

[Nempino25]

Hi Friends,

My team currently has three Looker instances that use GitHub to communicate with each other when a dashboard completes a step in the review process (e.g. when a PR is approved and deployed in our development instance, it is then passed to our staging instance, where we then deploy to that environment as well).

I am currently investigating the possibility of creating a dashboard in looker that tracks the status of each report as it passes through the PR process. I would like it to contain the following components:

1. Which Looker dashboards each user is working on
2. Which Looker dashboards each user has done in the past
3. Which Looker dashboards are being published to our Production server

I want this report to update automatically when a dashboard completes a stage of the Production process. For example, when a PR has been opened for a dashboard, I want the status to update to say 'PR Opened'. When a PR is approved, I want the status to say, 'Publish to Staging'. When it is published to staging, I want the status to say 'Stakeholder Review', and I want the stakeholder to be automatically notified that the dashboard is ready to review, with a link to the dashboard included in that notification.

I also want the report to automatically notify our Production Manager when its status is changed to 'Ready to Publish'.

According to ChatGPT, this is possible by combining Looker capabilities with external automation and integrations. Using Zapier, Make, or Airflow was suggested for automated status updates, while Slack was suggested for automated notifications.

I'm wondering if that is accurate, and if anything like this is possible. If any of you have done something like this, can you give me some specific tips to start out with? I work more on the front end, so I don't have a lot of development experience, but I am willing and anxious to learn. Thanks for any help you can provide!

[sam8]

I also only have vague ideas around this. 

You'd need to get Github PR information into a database in order for Looker to see it. I don't know if Github has any automated export capabilities - that's probably where Zapier and other third party integrations would come in.

As far as notifying the stakeholders, that part seems more concretely possible to me. You could create a dashboard tile with a list of PRs in the desired status, filtered by user attribute. Then you'd set up a schedule to send notifications (via email, Slack, whatever) to each user as long as the list is not empty. You could even set up the schedule to run every five minutes, and to "only send if results change" AND "there are results". That would effectively only ping stakeholders when a new PR needs their attention.

Keep us posted on whether you make progress here! This is a way cool use case.