The concept of spherical t-design, which is a finite subset of the unit sphere, was introduced by Delsarte-Goethals-Seidel (1977). The concept of Euclidean tdesign, which is a two step generalization of spherical design in the sense that it is a finite weighted subset of Euclidean space, by Neumaier-Seidel (1988). We first review these two concepts, as well as the concept of tight t-design, i.e., the one whose cardinality reaches the natural lower bound. We are interested in t-designs (spherical or Euclidean) which are either tight or close to tight. As is well known by Delsarte-Goethals-Seidel (1977), in the study of spherical t-designs and in particular of those which are either tight or close to tight, association schemes play important roles. The main purpose of this paper is to show that in the study of Euclidean t-designs and in particular of those which are either tight or close to tight, coherent configurations play important roles. Here, coherent configuration is a purely combinatorial concept defined by D. G. Higman, and is obtained by axiomatizing the properties of general, not necessarily transitive, permutation groups, in the same way as association scheme was obtained by axiomatizing the properties of transitive permutation groups. The main purpose of this paper is to prove that Euclidean t-designs satisfying certain conditions give the structure of coherent configurations. In particular, it is seen that a tight Euclidean t-design on two concentric spheres centered at the origin has the structure of coherent configuration. Moreover, as an application of this general theory, we discuss the current status of our research to try to classify Euclidean 4-designs (X, w) on two concentric spheres S = S 1 ∪ S 2 centered at the origin whose weight function is constant on each X ∩ S i (i = 1, 2) and the number of the inner products between the distinct two points in X ∩ S i and X ∩ S j is at most 2 for i, j = 1, 2. We describe all the parameters of the coherent configurations, in terms of the parameters of the Euclidean designs. The classification of such Euclidean 4-designs is not yet completed, but we have found two new families of feasible parameters of such Euclidean 4-designs and the associated coherent configurations. One family corresponds to Euclidean tight 4-designs on two concentric spheres and another family is obtained from non-tight Euclidean 4-designs (and is related to the spherical tight 4-designs of one dimension more).