Tableau Monitoring
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As more and more users are onboarded and the use of analytics grows across your organisation, Tableau becomes mission-critical for data-driven decisions. Without monitoring, a “set-it-and-forget-it” deployment can be met with inadequate resources that fail to support the workload of highly engaged users. Ongoing, proactive monitoring is required to operate and support your deployment at scale and meet the expectations of your user community.
Because Tableau is integrated with your enterprise architecture – including hardware, network, databases and applications – understanding how everything interoperates is key for routine monitoring from performance to troubleshooting. The monitoring function is focused on these systems and their integration with Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud. It is primarily technical in nature and performed by IT roles. Tableau Server administrators or Tableau Cloud site administrators will work together to ensure the platform meets evolving business needs.
BEST PRACTICE RECOMMENDATION:
Combine monitoring data with Measurement of Tableau user engagement and adoption data to shape new behaviours and accelerate towards your goal of becoming more data-driven by taking these insights into Internal Tableau activities like admin, user and champion group meetings.
For example, if you find numerous data sources with scheduled refreshes and workbooks that have not been accessed in 180 days, you can add a session on the content management policy for archiving and deleting stale content.
For Tableau Server, you can use a combination of hardware utilisation monitoring, data from Tableau Server’s Repository and external tools to understand and monitor the health of Tableau Server and how analytics are being consumed. Licensed as part of Tableau Advanced Management, Resource Monitoring Tool is an agent-based monitoring application. Resource Monitoring Tool offers enhanced insights into the health and performance of a Tableau Server cluster by parsing and analysing the logs generated by overall Server usage and combining that with monitoring of physical system usage (CPU usage, RAM, disk I/O etc.). In addition, standard enterprise monitoring platforms, such as Splunk, New Relic, or other agent-based utilities can be used for monitoring. With all the data that Tableau and these solutions collect, Tableau Desktop should be used to analyse activity on your Tableau Server.
It is just as important to monitor for things that go right as it is for things that go wrong. With viral adoption of Tableau in your organisation, you will need to be responsive to the increased workloads and proactively scale to avoid resource constraints. On the other hand, assuming a correctly sized hardware configuration is deployed initially, unmonitored hardware utilisation and user workloads, inefficient workbooks, suboptimal data extract design and peak-hour data refresh schedules can have a major impact on server performance and user experience, causing performance to degrade from the cumulative effect of the separate incidents.
For Tableau Server monitoring and operations, systems administrators and Tableau Server administrators should perform the following tasks:
- Set up tools to monitor hardware utilisation and maintain sufficient headroom for future growth and peak usage spikes.
- Configure built-in alerts and incidents to notify you of events and thresholds.
- Use default administrative views to identify background task success/failure and job queueing, slow workbooks, disk usage and licence allocations.
- Create custom administrative views from repository data for deeper analytics on your deployment and set custom data-driven alerts for your own organisation's policies and goals.
- Troubleshoot problems with Tableau Server logs.
Because Tableau Cloud is a SaaS analytics platform, Tableau monitors the infrastructure and operations; however, Tableau Cloud deployments still have monitoring tasks:
- Subscribe to Tableau Trust updates to get email, text and Atom feed or RSS feed notifications when Tableau creates, updates or resolves an incident. At any time, you can visit the Tableau Trust page to view system status.
- Monitor other systems that are integrated with Tableau Cloud such as authentication, database and network connectivity.
- Use default administrative views to identify background task success/failure and job queueing, slow workbooks, disk usage and licence allocations.
- Create custom administrative views from Tableau Cloud Admin Insights for deeper analytics on your deployment, and set custom data-driven alerts for your own organisation's policies and goals.