Tableau Deployment Guide

By default Tableau products send usage data to Tableau so that we can understand how customers use our software, and gain insights into where they are successful and where they might run into problems that we can address. For example, this data can help us learn where upgrades are commonly failing and allow us to make product changes to address those issues, or identify what portion of our user base needs informed about a security issue that applies to a specific version of Tableau Server. You can disable the sending of this data at installation time, or later. For details on how to do this, see the instructions for Tableau Desktop(Link opens in a new window) or Tableau Server(Link opens in a new window).

Even when you disable the sending of product usage data, certain basic product data is sent to Tableau. This Basic Product Data includes information about products and their processes, including which product or process is running, when they start up, what operating system they are running on, licensing information, which machine or cluster of machines has sent the data (using unique pseudonymized identifiers), and whether the product is configured to send product usage data.

You can disable the sending of Basic Product Data at the machine level, or at the enterprise level, by blocking traffic sent to prod.telemetry.tableausoftware.com.

Disabling sharing of Basic Product Data on individual computers

Important: This procedure involves modifying your local hosts file. If you do not know what this is, you should not change it. You should only make this change if you understand the implications of making changes to the file, know how to change the file, and have made a backup of the file for safety.

Modifying hosts files changes network behavior for computers. Detailed instructions for modifying hosts files are provided by operating system providers such as Microsoft, Apple or Linux Distributions.

1. Make a copy of your existing hosts file and save it to a computer that is not your Tableau computer. This is your backup, in case you need to reverse your changes. Do not start modifying the file until you have made a backup copy of it.

2. Modify your computer’s hosts file to include these lines:

# Stops sending Product Usage to Tableau (prod.telemetry.tableausoftware.com).
# Learn more here: http:\\tableau.com\derived-data
127.0.0.1    prod.telemetry.tableausoftware.com

The first and second lines are comments, explaining the third line.

The third line prevents all traffic to prod.telemetry.tableausoftware.com (http://prod.telemetry.tableausoftware.com/) from leaving your local machine by sending it to the Internal host loopback address. The data does not get sent outside the computer.

Disabling the sharing of Basic Product Data at the enterprise level

To disable sending of Basic Product Data on an enterprise level, modify your Network Firewall to prevent outbound traffic to prod.telemetry.tableausoftware.com.

This domain is used by Tableau to receive the Basic Product Data about process launch and shutdown. It is also used for the more general Product Usage Data. Blocking traffic to this domain it you will prevent both kinds of data from being sent.

Traffic to this domain will occur on Ports 80 (for initial registration of our Product Data clients) and on Port 443 (for all subsequent traffic). To completely prevent product data from being sent, block all traffic to this domain.

For details on how to configure your network firewall, refer to your vendor or your internal IT department. Tableau cannot provide these instructions.