Manage Admin Insights
Admin Insights is a Tableau Cloud-only project that is pre-populated with carefully curated data sources and a pre-built workbook of your site's data. Using the resources available to you through the Admin Insights project, you can create custom views to help answer a range of common questions you might have about your site.
Admin Insights versus Admin views
The Admin Insights project and the pre-built admin views (accessible from Tableau Cloud’s Status page) are both valuable tools for monitoring the health and activity of your Tableau Cloud site. One tool does not replace the other.
To determine which tool to use, consider the following:
| Admin Insights | Admin Views |
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What's included with the Admin Insights project
The Admin Insights project is comprised of the following:
Admin Insights data sources – TS Events, TS Users, Groups, Site Content, Viz Load Times, Job Performance, Permissions, Subscriptions and Tokens. You can use these data sources on which to create new data sources if you need to enrich the data with custom calculations or other data from your organisation. For more information about the data sources, see Explore the data sources.
Admin Insights Starter – a pre-built workbook that contains dashboards based on the Admin Insights data sources. These dashboards are intended to serve as templates on which to build more dashboards and views that can go more in depth and answer questions that are unique to your site's deployment or organisation. For more information about the dashboards, see Explore the pre-built workbook.
Tableau System Account – data sources in the Admin Insights project are updated by the Tableau System Account. While events conducted by this account are not visible in the data sources, the Tableau System Account is listed as the owner of Admin Insights content by default. This account exists to provide Admin Insights data to your Admin Insights project.
About data freshness
The Admin Insights data sources contain up to 90 days of data about your site by default or 365 days with Advanced Management. For more information, see About Tableau Advanced Management on Tableau Cloud. The data sources can be updated daily or weekly. To specify the update frequency for Admin Insights data sources, go to Settings, and on the General tab, scroll to Admin Insights Update Frequency.
Because the Admin Insights Starter is based on these data sources, dashboards in the workbook always show up-to-date information. Periodically, Tableau updates the workbook itself. For more information, see Get updates to the Admin Insights Starter later in this topic.
Share access to Admin Insights
The Admin Insights content is initially visible to site admins only. Consider extending access to other site users in your organisation to enable them to build, curate and gain insight unique to their needs and workflows and ultimately help them manage their content more effectively. For more information about extending project permissions to non-site admins, see Permissions.
Move or rename the Admin Insights Starter
Tableau strongly recommends that you move the pre-built workbook, Admin Insights Starter, to a different project or simply rename it. Doing so helps ensure that your changes are preserved and do not get overwritten by periodic updates Tableau makes to the pre-built workbook.
For more information, see the Get updates to the Admin Insights Starter below.
Get updates to the Admin Insights Starter
Periodically, Tableau makes updates to the Admin Insights Starter. The updates are automatically applied to the Admin Insights Starter workbook in the Admin Insights project. The updates are summarised in the Release Notes workbook that is also available in the Admin Insights project. Updates can include new fields or field descriptions, new views, updates to existing views and more.
To make sure you get the latest updates to the Admin Insights Starter, and none of the changes you make to the workbook are overwritten, follow the steps described below.
Step 1: Prepare for updates
In order to preserve the changes you make to your workbook and avoid these changes from being overwritten by Tableau, Tableau recommends that you do one of the following tasks:
- Move the workbook to a different project
- Rename the workbook
To maintain both your changes and Tableau's latest workbook improvements, you'll need to repeat one of the above tasks after each update that Tableau makes.
Step 2: Check for updates
As part of its update process, Tableau recreates and then adds the Admin Insights Starter to your Admin Insights project.
If you've moved or renamed the workbook, a new "Admin Insights Starter" is added to your Admin Insights project. You can verify the new workbook by its modified date or by its publish date in revision history.
Step 3: Use Revision History to undo changes (optional)
If you were unable to move or rename the workbook before Tableau replaced the Admin Insights Starter, or you don't care for the update, you can use revision history to revert the changes. For more information about revision history, see Work with Content Revisions(Link opens in a new window) in the Tableau User Help.
Step 4: Manually make or move your changes to the latest Admin Insights Starter
To ensure that your changes are reflected in the same workbook as the changes made by Tableau, you'll need to follow the procedure below.
In the latest version of the Admin Insights Starter workbook, you do can do one or both of the following:
- Manually make the changes that you made in your version of the workbook to the latest version of the workbook.
- Export the sheet from your version of the workbook and save it to the latest version of workbook. For more information about exporting sheets, see Export and import sheets between workbooks(Link opens in a new window) in the Tableau User Help.
Move or rename the latest workbook again, so that any new updates Tableau makes to the Admin Insights Starter does not overwrite your changes.
Tips for managing Admin Insights
Although the Admin Insights project functions just like any other project on your site, Tableau recommends you consider the following while managing the project:
Move the Admin Insights Starter to a different location. If you plan to make updates to Admin Insights Starter, Tableau recommends that you either 1) move the workbook to a different project or 2) rename the workbook. Doing one of these tasks ensures that your changes are preserved and do not get overwritten by periodic updates that Tableau automatically makes to the workbook. For more information, see Get updates to the Admin Insights Starter.
Use caution when moving data sources. If you move any of the Admin Insights data sources outside of the Admin Insights project, Tableau will be unable to refresh them. The data sources are also periodically updated by Tableau. To ensure the data sources are refreshed and your changes are preserved, keep the TS Events, TS Users, Groups, Site Content, Viz Load Times, Job Performance, Permissions, Subscriptions and Tokens data sources in the Admin Insights project.
Designate other users, including users who are not site admins, to access and create content for the project. For example, allow a user to create new views based on the TS Events, TS Users, Groups, Site Content, Viz Load Times, Job Performance, Permissions, Subscriptions and Tokens data sources. For more information about changing project permissions, see Set permissions.