Remove Unneeded Files

As a best practice, you should regularly monitor disk space usage on your server. If the Tableau Server computer runs low on disk space, the impact to can be significant, including ultimately causing a failure. If you determine that space is getting low, you can archive any you want to save, and purge unneeded files, freeing up space for Tableau.

Monitoring disk space usage

There are several things you can do to monitor disk space usage:

• Notifications: You can configure Tableau Server to send notifications when disk space reaches predetermined levels. For more information, see Configure Server Event Notification.
• Administrative views: You can use a pre-built administrative view to help monitor disk space usage. For more information, Server Disk Space.

Reducing disk space usage

To make more disk space available, you can take the following steps:

• Archive log files: Tableau Server generates log files when running. These can be helpful in troubleshooting issues, and when you are working with Tableau Support, but you do not need to leave them in place indefinitely. To save disk space without losing logs, you can archive them with the tsm maintenance ziplogs command, and then copy the ziplogs archive to a computer that is not part of the Tableau installation for safe keeping. For more information, see Log File Snapshots (Archive Logs).

• Clean up unwanted files: After archiving any logs you want to save, use the tsm maintenance cleanup command to remove log files older than seven days, temporary files, and optionally, rows from the http_requests table in the Tableau Server repository. You should run the cleanup command regularly. For more information about which files are removed, see tsm maintenance cleanup.

• Remove other files: Over time Tableau Server can generate files that do not need to be left in place. In addition to the files mentioned above, be aware of files like old backups from previous versions. Tableau Server backup files have a .tsbak extension. We strongly recommend regularly backing up Tableau, and saving the backup files to a computer that is not part of the Tableau Server installation for safe keeping, but once you save the file in another location, you can delete it from the Tableau computer. For more information on backup files, including how to create them and where they are saved, see Back up Tableau Server data.