Tableau Server on Windows Help

Administrative views can be used to monitor the activities related to flows, performance history, and the disk space used. The Status page contains an embedded Tableau workbook with various administrative views that can be used to monitor different types of server or site activity.

For Tableau Server installations, you must install PostgreSQL drivers before you can see Administrative views. For more information, see Database Drivers(Link opens in a new window) (Linux), Database Drivers(Link opens in a new window) (Windows). Server administrators can use these views to see activity both at the server level (aggregated for all sites) or for a specific site. Only server administrators can filter by site.

Who can do this?

Tableau Server administrators and Tableau Site administrators can both view and work with Administrative Views. Only Server administrators can filter by site.

Action by all users

Use this view to gather insight into how flows are being used. This includes actions like publish, download, and flow runs. You can filter the view by actions, by site, and by time range. The Total Users count shows the number of users who have performed an action. This value is not affected by any filtering. The Active user count shows the number of users who have been active during the selected time period and performed one of the selected actions.

Action by Specific User

Use this view to gather insights about how an individual user is working with flows. You can filter the view by user name, the type of action, time range, and by site.

Action by Recent Users

This view shows you which users have been active on Tableau Server over the past 24 hours.

This can be useful if you need to do some maintenance activity on the server and want to know which users and how many this will affect, and what they're doing.

The view shows Active, Recently Active, and Idle users that are currently signed in to Tableau Server.

For this view, an active user is one who took an action in the last 5 minutes, a recently active user is one who last took an action within 30 minutes, and an idle user is one who last took an action more than 30 minutes ago.

Select a user to see only the actions that user performed recently. Hover over an action to see details of the action.

Backgrounder Task Delays

This view shows the delay for extract refresh tasks, subscription, and flow tasks—that is, the amount of time between when they are scheduled to run and when they actually run. You can use the view to help identify places you can improve server performance by distributing your task schedules and optimizing tasks.

Possible reasons for the delays and ways to reduce the delays include the following:

• Many tasks are scheduled for the same time.

  In the example view, tasks that show long delays are clustered at the same time every day, which creates spikes in the wait time. You can set the Timeline filter to a single day to view task delays by hour and identify the hours of the day when many tasks are scheduled at the same time. One solution is to distribute the tasks to off-peak hours to reduce load on the server.

• Other server processes running at the same time are consuming server resources and slowing down performance.

  Monitor the CPU and memory usage of server processes to identify processes that consume the most resources, then adjust the configuration of processes on your server.

  For more information on monitoring processes, see Collect Data with Windows Performance Monitor(Link opens in a new window).

Background Tasks for Non Extracts

Background Tasks are created to run flows (scheduled and ad hoc). You can use this view to see how many flow tasks succeeded or failed on this site. For details on a task, hover over its icon.

Performance of Flow Runs

Use this view to see the performance history for all the flows on a site. You can filter by Flow Name, Output Step Name, Flow Owner, Run Type (Scheduled or Ad Hoc), and the time the flow runs were started.

Questions you can answer using this view include:

• What flow tasks are currently scheduled? – To do this, use the Start Time filter and select the time frame you want to look at. For example, to see flow tasks that are scheduled in the next 3 hours, select Hours -> Next -> and enter 3.

• What is the duration of flow tasks? - To answer this, click on a mark in the view to see details, including the task duration.

• How many flows were run ad hoc, and how many were scheduled runs? - To answer this, use the Run Type filter and select Ad hoc or Scheduled.

This view can also show you the following information:

• Flows with the highest run frequency have the most marks.

• To see flows that are currently running at the same time, hover over a mark that shows “In Progress” or “Pending and select “Keep Only” to filter all flow runs that are currently running.

• To see flows that are running at the same time during a specific time range, select a range for the Start Time filter. For example, select “Next three hours” to see which flows will be running in the next three hours.

Stats for Space Usage

Use this view to identify which flow outputs are taking up the most disk space on the server. Disk space usage is displayed by user, project, and by the size of flow output and is rounded down to the nearest number.

Use the Min Size filter to control which flow outputs are displayed, based on the amount of space they take up. Use the object type filter for flows.

• What Users Use the Most Space – This section shows the users who own flows (when filtered for flows) that are taking up the most space. Click a user name to filter the next two graphs for that user.

• What Projects Use the Most Space – This section shows the projects with flows (when filtered for flows) that are using the most space.

• What Workbooks, Data Source and Flows Use the Most Space – This section shows the flows (when filtered for flows) that take up the most space.

Who can do this

• Tableau Server Administrators:
  • Setup email notifications at the server level
  • Set up email notifications for a site
  • View errors
  • Resume suspended tasks
  • View alerts
  • view process status
• Tableau Site Administrators:
  • Set up email notifications at the site level
  • View errors
  • Resume suspended tasks
  • View alerts
• Flow owners, project leaders and any user who is granted permissions to view the flow:
  • View errors
  • Resume suspended tasks
  • View alerts (Flow owners)