About Tableau Pulse

With Tableau Pulse, users receive personalized data insights about metrics that they follow. These insights are sent directly to users in Slack and email digests, giving them access to the data they need in the tools they already use. If users want to learn more about their data, they can visit a metric's insights exploration page on Tableau Cloud. On that page, users can engage in guided data analysis to understand what is driving changes to their data.

Tableau Pulse is available for Tableau Cloud. To get a site ready for Tableau Pulse, a site administrator must first turn on the setting and make sure that there's appropriate data to work with. Then, users can create metric definitions, which specify the core metadata for metrics. Users create metrics based on these definitions by adjusting filter and time options to scope the data in ways that are useful for different groups of followers.

The articles here help you get started with Tableau Pulse, whether you're a Tableau administrator setting up your site, a Creator defining the metadata that metrics are based on, a Viewer exploring existing metrics, or a developer embedding metrics.

Article Audience About
Set Up Your Site for Tableau Pulse Site Administrators Settings, permissions, and requirements for Tableau Pulse
Create Metrics with Tableau Pulse Creators, Site Administrator Explorers, and Explorers (can publish) Definitions and metrics and how to create them
Explore Metrics with Tableau Pulse Creators, Explorers, and Viewers The types of analysis you can do with existing metrics
Set Manual Goals with Tableau Pulse Creators, Explorers, and Viewers Goals that let you track metric progress
Ask Questions and Discover Insights in Tableau Pulse(Link opens in a new window) Creators, Explorers, and Viewers Options for finding insights with Ask Q&A (single metric exploration) or with Enhanced Q&A (grouped metric exploration powered by AI in Tableau)
The Insights Platform and Insight Types in Tableau Pulse Creators, Explorers, and Viewers The insight types available in Tableau Pulse and general information about how the Insights platform works
Get Alerts About Tableau Pulse Insights Creators, Explorers, and Viewers New unfavorable trend alerts for the metrics that you follow
Tableau Pulse REST API Methods(Link opens in a new window) Developers The API methods to create metrics, get metric details, generate insights, and more
Embed Tableau Pulse(Link opens in a new window) Developers The Tableau Embedding API web component for embedding metrics in a web page
Set Up the Pulse for Salesforce App Salesforce customers The Pulse app that Salesforce customers can purchase
Configure a Tableau Pulse Lightning Web Component Salesforce customers The Tableau Pulse Lightning web component for Salesforce Lightning pages
Interact with Data on Tableau Mobile(Link opens in a new window) Creators, Explorers, and Viewers Tableau Pulse on Tableau Mobile

Tableau Pulse release notes

Added in March 2025

Discover more insights with enhanced Q&A (Tableau+, English language only)

Enhanced Q&A (Discover) makes it easier to explore insights across groups of business-critical metrics, and then dig deeper on the Discover page. When metrics in Tableau Pulse are grouped by data source, definition, or time range, Discover uses statistical algorithms to examine grouped metrics and surface insights that are relevant, interesting, and worth investigating.

The Discover page in Tableau Pulse with an insight brief, metric sources, and new question entered by a user

The enhanced Q&A experience provides intuitive key insights, relevant visualizations, source references, and suggested follow-up questions to help you dig deeper. Because it is powered by AI in Tableau, you can ask questions in your own words to get relevant, natural language answers about your data.

Enhanced Q&A is available as a Tableau+ premium feature in Tableau Pulse on both web and mobile. This feature is available in English language only at this time. For more information, see Ask Questions and Discover Insights in Tableau Pulse(Link opens in a new window).

Better semantic matches in any language for Ask Q&A

Turning on this setting enhances semantic matching for any language when you use Ask Q&A. When this setting is on, questions and insights text are sent to OpenAI as part of semantic matching. All calls to OpenAI go through the Einstein Trust Layer(Link opens in a new window). For more information, see Turn on better semantic matches for Ask Q&A in Tableau(Link opens in a new window)

Get alerts for new unfavorable trends

If Tableau Pulse detects a new unfavorable trend in the data for a metric that you follow, you receive an alert about that trend in your email and Slack digests. If you use Tableau Mobile, you also receive a notification on your mobile device. For more information, see Get Alerts About Tableau Pulse Insights.

Tableau Mobile Pulse alert for new unfavorable trend

Control who can create metric definitions from a data source

Data sources have a new Create Metric Definitions permission capability. With this capability, you can now separately control who can create metric definitions from a data source and who can view metrics that use that data source. For more information, see Permissions for creating metric definitions.

Data source permission for Create Metric Defintions

Adjust when Tableau Pulse starts generating digests

Tableau site administrators can set the time at which Tableau Pulse starts generating email and Slack digests. That way, if your data refreshes at a specific time, the digests reflect the freshest data. For more information, see Set the digest start time.

Site setting for Digest start time

Set the aggregation type for data source goals

You can now choose how Tableau Pulse aggregates the data for a data source goal. Measures can be aggregated as a sum, average, median, maximum, or minimum, and dimensions can be aggregated as a count or distinct count to produce a measure. Previously, all data source goals were aggregated as a sum. Additionally, you can now set data source goals for metric definitions that use any aggregation. Previously, you could create data source goals only for metric definitions where the measure was aggregated as a sum or count. For more information, see Configure data source goals.

Data source goals aggregation selector

Create an advanced data source goal

The advanced editor lets you create data source goals using the familiar Tableau viz authoring environment. You can use the advanced editor to create goals based on calculated fields. For more information, see Configure data source goals.

Data source goal advanced goal option

Added in January 2025
Added in December 2024
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