Tableau Cloud Help

Data Connect is a product that is managed by site admins. But it can service queries for all users on a Tableau Cloud Site. Creators who publish content will need to keep a few things in mind when connecting to private network data using Data Connect. Those items are outlined below. Explorers and Viewers will utilize Data Connect, but will largely be unaware of whether or not it is in use.

Data Connect deploys the Bridge client which services database queries. The Bridge clients used in Data Connect are individual deployments of Tableau Bridge on Linux for Containers. Therefore, Data Connect supports all database connectors and database authentication patterns that Tableau Bridge on Linux for Containers supports. For more information, see Connectivity with Bridge.

Data Connect supports both live and extract data sources.

Data Connect only supports database drivers built for Linux. The drivers must be included in the base image that site admins configure during Data Connect setup.

Creators who need to connect to private network data with Data Connect follow the same process of connecting to data(Link opens in a new window) with Tableau Desktop and publishing it to Tableau Cloud. There are two additional steps required for keeping that data fresh with Data Connect:

• When setting up Data Connect, site admins create pools. Pools define the database domains that will use Data Connect. Queries to that database domain are sent to the Data Connect Bridge client.

• (Published Data Sources only) Data Source owners must take one additional action for each data source after publishing it to Tableau Cloud to use Data Connect.

After a data source is published you can rotate the credentials of that data source and update other aspects of the connection information. See Update Bridge Connection Information.

• Using embedded data sources: Data Connect supports querying embedded data sources. There are many advantages to using published data sources to scale centralized data sources. For more information, see Using Embedded Data Sources(Link opens in a new window).

• Setting up refresh schedules: Data Connect allows you to schedule refreshes of extract data on a regular basis. See SSet Up a Private Network Refresh Schedule.

• Managing email alerts: If enabled by your site admin, you will receive email alerts about refresh failures for all of the data sources that you own. When refreshes for your data sources are managed by Data Connect, the type of alerts you receive, when you receive the alerts, and the alerts that you can configure will differ from Tableau Cloud alerts. See Manage Email Alerts for Bridge(Link opens in a new window).

Individual jobs are handled by the Data Connect Bridge client. To determine the underlying cause, the troubleshooting steps required will depend on the user scenario.

Site admins have access to data about all refresh jobs serviced by Data Connect. For more information on accessing this data, see Monitoring Data Connect query health.

The Admin Insights Job Performance data source is especially useful in identifying if issues are occurring commonly on the same database or on the same Data Connect Agent.

In the event that a node becomes unhealthy, the Bridge clients and the queries they execute can fail. To troubleshoot node health, see Troubleshooting service initialization and health.

Live query errors arise when a user opens a dashboard with a live data source configured to use Data Connect. These errors indicate that there is an issue with the connection to the database. For common troubleshooting steps, see Identifying causes for live query issues .

Data source owners receive email notifications if an extract refresh is unsuccessful. These email notifications will contain error messages that can support troubleshooting the issue. For more information about how Data Source owners can troubleshoot their jobs, see Identifying causes for scheduled refresh issues.