Tableau Cloud Help

Entity snapshots provide cloud administrators with a tabular record of the content, users, and relationships that make up your site. While standard event logs record what occurred at a specific moment, entity snapshots capture the full state of everything that existed at that time. Entity snapshots are available only through the Tableau Cloud Manager (TCM) REST API, not through the Activity Log S3 integration.

With entity snapshots, you can monitor and optimize your deployment, automate content management, and ensure your site meets security and compliance requirements.

Before you begin

• You must have a Tableau Enterprise or Tableau+ license.

• You must have the cloud administrator role in TCM.

• You must configure a personal access token (PAT) or unified access token (UAT) to authenticate your TCM REST API sessions.

Entity snapshots versus event logs

Entity snapshots and event logs are both valuable administrative tools, but they serve different purposes. To determine which data type fits your use case, consider the following:

	Entity snapshots	Event logs
Purpose	Captures the full state of site content, users, and relationships at a specific moment.	Captures actions and activities across tenants and sites as they occur.
Update frequency	Every 60 minutes	Tableau (default): 1 day Advanced Management, Tableau Enterprise, and Tableau+: Less than 15 minutes
Data retention	14 days	Tableau (default): 14 days Advanced Management, Tableau Enterprise, and Tableau+: Up to 365 days
Format	Tabular data sets delivered as parquet files	Semi-structured event records delivered as JSON text files
Access	Tableau Cloud Manager REST API	Tableau Cloud Manager REST API or Amazon S3

Retrieve entity snapshots

To retrieve entity snapshots, use the List entity snapshots for site and Get entity snapshots for site platform data methods in the Tableau Cloud Manager REST API. For more information, see Platform Data(Link opens in a new window).

The retrieval process involves these steps:

1. Authenticate your session using a PAT or UAT.

2. Identify your site LUID (locally unique identifier).

3. Generate download URLs for your snapshot files.

Understand the snapshot schema

Each snapshot download contains a set of tables, where each table represents a specific entity type on your site, such as workbooks, users, or projects. To understand the attributes available in each table, review the schema definitions before building integrations or dashboards. For a full list of entity snapshot tables, see Entity Snapshots Reference.

Integrate snapshot data

After you download your snapshot files, complete these steps to store and integrate the data into your workflows. You can also automate this process using the Tableau Cloud Platform Data Loader(Link opens in a new window), an open source tool available on GitHub.

1. Copy to centralized storage: Upload your files to a cloud repository, such as Amazon S3, Azure, or Google Cloud Storage. You can also use local file storage if you prefer.

2. Import to data warehouses: Import the data into data warehouses such as Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or Google BigQuery.

3. Create monitoring dashboards: Combine your historical snapshot data with Activity Log events in Tableau or other analytical tools to build compliance and site performance dashboards. These dashboards can also be shared with non-admins through row-level security.

Entity snapshots refresh every 60 minutes and are retained for 14 days. For update frequency and data retention for Activity Log events, see Event update frequency and data retention.