About Data Connect

Applies to: Tableau Cloud

In your environment, the Data Connect Kubernetes cluster oversees a set of Docker containers. The containers support the runtime environment that consists of one or more agents. The agent is the program that runs tasks and enables secure communication across the firewall between your organization.

Data Connect services include:

  • Cluster monitoring and troubleshooting: Tableau monitors the health and usage of the Data Connect agent. Telemetry data are collected to ensure resources are used in the most effective and efficient manner.

  • Cluster maintenance: Upgrades are automatically deployed and the cluster operation and maintenance is owned and fully performed by Tableau. Data Connect automatically optimizes the deployment for your workload based on needs and available compute pool.

  • Alert monitoring: Incident management is provided continuously to quickly resolve issues to limit business impact.

Supported connections and environments

Data Connect currently supports on-premise and VCP environments: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Overview

The Data Connect architecture consists of three main components and responsibility boundaries. While there's some overlap, Tableau is primarily responsible for the application and orchestration layers and customers are responsible for the infrastructure (compute, OS, networking, and storage) and where it’s located.

To get started, you execute a script on each of your Linux servers that results in a Tableau-managed Kubernetes cluster in your environment. This Kubernetes cluster is then managed by Tableau by creating an outbound connection from the cluster to two managed locations.

You then build and deploy a Docker container to your Kubernetes cluster, which allows Tableau to deploy and remotely manage the Data Connect agent within a Docker container through the outbound connection from the cluster. After you establish the connection, you can specify the mapping to your private network data sources and use it to access your data.

Your data is transmitted directly from the Data Connect agent to Tableau Cloud. Data Connect doesn’t require external network access, firewall holes, or remote machine access.

Architecture

  1. Tableau Cloud -> orchestration service

  2. Kubernetes cluster -> orchestration service

  3. Kubernetes cluster -> Docker container

  4. Tableau user -> Tableau Cloud

  5. Data Connect agent (Docker container) -> Tableau Cloud

  6. Data Connect agent (Docker container) -> customer database

Environment boundaries

Application

The Data Connect containers provide the scalability and streamlined management capabilities of containerized workloads.

Orchestration

A remotely managed and maintained Kubernetes cluster hosting the Data Connect containers.

Infrastructure

Storage, networking, and compute (OS, CPU, memory) are the resources required for the computing infrastructure layer.

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