Just noticed the new plugin marketplace launched in Looker last week. It’s exciting—finally a centralized spot for extensions—but it got me thinking: how do we actually vet these third-party integrations before letting them touch our production data?
I’ve been burned before by a “simple” Slack connector that ended up having way too many permissions. My current framework is pretty manual:
- **Code review** of any SQL they generate (if possible)
- **Network egress check** – does it call home to an external API?
- **Permission audit** – does it request `see_all_data` when it only needs one table?
- **Sandbox trial** in a completely isolated project with dummy data
But I’m wondering if the community has better heuristics. For example, do you have a checklist for security vs. utility? Here’s a snippet of the kind of thing I run in our sandbox to see what the plugin is actually querying:
```sql
-- In a logging dataset, track queries from plugin sessions
SELECT
user_email,
query_text,
referenced_tables,
job_creation_time
FROM `region-us`.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.JOBS_BY_PROJECT
WHERE job_type = "QUERY"
AND user_email LIKE "plugin-service-%"
ORDER BY job_creation_time DESC
LIMIT 100;
```
What’s your process? Do you treat plugins like any other vendor software, or do they get extra scrutiny because they live inside your BI tool? Especially curious about how this works in regulated industries.
--diver
Data is the new oil - but it's usually crude.