Tableau maintenance
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As the use of analytics grows across your organisation, Tableau will become mission-critical for data-driven business decisions. Regular maintenance activities will keep your Tableau deployment running in top condition. Monitoring data will be the driver behind many maintenance decisions.
You will operationalise change management processes to support the increased use of analytics, including performance tuning, load testing and capacity planning for Tableau Server. For both Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud, upgrades will need to be planned and executed alongside the communications, education and support plans to move to a new version of Tableau.
Tableau Server
Tableau Server administrators will check the status of the server, analyse and monitor server activity, manage scheduled tasks and perform other maintenance activities. Tableau Server maintenance activities are listed in the table below:
Task | Description | With | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
Active Directory Synchronisation | Synchronises Active Directory groups | Tableau Server settings | Daily |
Backup production environment | Creates a copy of content and settings in location outside of the Tableau Server cluster, retained for seven days | TSM CLI | Daily |
Restore production to test environment | Puts test environment in current state of production environment | TSM CLI | Prior to load testing, testing an upgrade or participation in beta programme |
Database maintenance / log file cleanup | Remove and archive Tableau Server log files, temporary files and rows from the table http_requests in the Tableau Server PostgreSQL database | TSM CLI | Monthly
|
Load testing / | Understand your Tableau Server’s capacity with respect to your environment, data, workload and usage profile | TabJolt (Windows only) | Quarterly |
Resource management | Archive stale content that has not been accessed in 180 days | Admin view | Two to four times per year prior to upgrade |
Upgrades | Process to evaluate new releases and plan/execute the upgrade | TSM CLI | Agreed-upon schedule among sponsors and project team |
Tableau Cloud
One of the benefits of Tableau Cloud is that it is maintained by Tableau because it is a SaaS analytics platform. As a result, minimal maintenance activities are needed:
Task | Description | With | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
Stale content management | Archive stale content that has not been accessed in 180 days | Admin view | Two to four times per year |
Client upgrades | Process to evaluate new releases and plan/execute the client upgrade | Client testing | On release schedule |