Tableau Blueprint

Version Current; Last Updated 3/11/2020

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Contents
Tableau Blueprint Overview 1

Core Capabilities of Data-Driven Organizations 2

Agility 3

Proficiency 4

Community 4

Governed and Trusted Data 5

A Repeatable Process for Tableau Blueprint 6

Step 1: Discover 7

Step 2: Govern 7

Step 3: Deploy 7

Step 4: Evolve 8

Analytics Strategy 9

Discovery Process 9

Tableau Roles and Responsibilities 10

Tableau Enterprise Architecture Survey 10

Tableau Data and Analytics Survey 12

Tableau Use Cases and Data Sources 13

Use Cases 13

Ideas for Initial Use Cases 14

Tableau Education Role Mapping 15

Current State Definition 15

Future State Definition 15

License Types 16

Education Role 16

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Tableau Users 17

Tableau Community Planning 18

Executive Advocacy and Project Team 21

Executive Sponsor Roles and Responsibilities 21

Tableau Project Team Roles and Responsibilities 24

IT/BI Professional Roles 25

Tableau Administrator Roles 27

Tableau Content Creator Roles 28

Tableau Content Consumer Roles 29

Tableau Governance 31

Modern Analytics Workflow 32

Governance in Tableau 34

Data Governance in Tableau 35

Data Source Management 35

Data Quality 38

Enrichment & Preparation 40

Data Security 42

Metadata Management 43

Monitoring & Management 47

Data Governance Summary 48

Content Governance in Tableau 49

Content Management 50

Authorization 53

Content Validation 57

Content Promotion 58

Content Certification 60

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Content Utilization 61

Content Governance Summary 62

Tableau Governance Models 63

Centralized 64

Delegated 64

Self-Governing 64

Tableau Deployment 67

Tableau Server Architecture 67

Hardware Platform 69

Deployment Type 69

Hardware requirements 70

Initial Sizing 70

Scalability 71

Server Environments 72

High Availability 73

Disaster Recovery 75

Authentication and Authorization 76

Identity Store 76

Authentication 77

Active Directory & OpenLDAP 78

SAML 79

Trusted Tickets 80

Mutual SSL 81

Authorization 81

Network Communication 82

Network Topologies 82

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On-Premises with External VPN Access 83

On-Premises with Reverse Proxy 83

Public Cloud Deployment 84

Data Strategy 84

Tableau’s Hybrid Data Architecture 85

Live Connection 85

In-Memory Extract 86

Query Federation 86

Data Server 87

Certified Data Sources 87

Data Security 88

Tableau Server Add-ons 89

Tableau Data Management Add-on 89

Tableau Server Management Add-on 90

Analytics Extensions 90

Extensibility 90

REST API 90

Extract API 91

Hyper API 91

Web Data Connector 91

JavaScript API 92

Extensions API 92

Document API 92

TSM API 92

Metadata API 93

Mobile App Bootstrap 93

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Tableau License Types 93

Tableau Creator 93

Tableau Explorer 94

Tableau Viewer 94

Client Software 95

Tableau Support Programs 96

Tableau Monitoring 97

Administrative Roles and Responsibilities 98

Hardware Monitoring 98

Built-in Alerts 100

Resource Monitoring Tool Incidents 101

Tableau Server Process Status 101

Administrative Views 103

Troubleshooting 106

Tableau Maintenance 109

Active Directory Synchronization 110

Back-up and Restore 110

Database Maintenance 110

Load Testing 111

Capacity Planning 112

Resource Management 113

Stale Content 113

Size Audit 113

Upgrades 113

Tableau Education 119

Skills by Tableau Education Role 119

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Enable a data culture in your organization 120

Executive Sponsor 120

Community Leader 121

Data Steward 121

Provide insights and develop visualization solutions 121

Consumer 122

Author 122

Designer 122

Analyst 123

Data Scientist 123

Developer 124

Deploy and manage Tableau 124

Site Administrator 124

Server Administrator 125

Server Architect 125

Skills by Tableau License Type 125

Tableau Creator Skills 126

Tableau Explorer Skills 127

Tableau Viewer Skills 128

Developing a Tableau Education Plan 128

Learning Paths 128

Education Resources 130

Accountability and Reward Systems 130

Role Badges 131

Certification 131

Skill Belts 132

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Gamification 133

Measurement of Tableau User Engagement and Adoption 135

Tableau Administrative Roles and Responsibilities 136

Tableau Administrative Views 136

Tableau Server Content Utilization 138

Tableau User Engagement 142

Content Size and Performance 144

Compliance 146

Analytics Best Practices in Tableau 147

Why Visual Analytics? 147

Pre-attentive Attributes 147

Explaining Visual Encoding 148

The Cycle of Visual Analysis 151

Start with Questions 152

Get Data 152

Choose Visual Mapping 153

View Data 153

Develop Insights 154

Act (Share) 154

Visual Best Practices 155

Audience 155

Context 155

Chart Choice 156

Layout 158

Color 159

Titles & Subtitles 159

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Tooltips 160

Fonts 162

Dashboard Size 163

Dashboard Interactivity 164

Designing for Performance 165

Accessibility 166

Organizational Assets 167

Visual Style Guide 167

Dashboard Layout Template 168

Dashboard Review Checklist 168

Metadata Checklist 169

Presentation Guidelines 169

Tableau Communications 173

Tableau Enablement Intranet 173

Getting Started 174

FAQ 175

Support 175

Announcements 176

User Directory 176

Governance Models 176

Data Platforms 176

Certified Data Source Directory 177

Analytics Best Practices 177

Visual Style Guide 177

Inspiration 177

Events Calendar 178

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Learning Plans 178

Training Videos 178

Company Education Calendar 178

User Group Recordings 179

Tableau Blog and Newsletter 179

Tableau Discussion Forums and Chat 179

Getting Started 179

Building Your Forum 180

Learn from Tableau 181

Tableau Community Engagement 183

Internal Tableau Activities 183

Tableau User Group 184

Tableau Champions Group 185

Tableau Admin Group 186

Tableau Lunch & Learn 187

Tableau Viz Games 187

Tableau Day 188

Analytics Day 188

External Tableau Activities 188

Area Tableau User Group 189

Virtual Tableau User Group 189

Tableau Public Virtual Challenges 189

Tableau Community Forums 190

Tableau Conferences 190

Iron Viz Competition 190

Tableau Support Processes 191

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Tableau Champion Development 191

Peer-to-Peer Assistance 192

Tableau Data Doctor 193

Mentoring 193

Tableau Discussion Forums & Chat 193

External Tableau Community Forum 193

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Tableau Blueprint Overview

The importance of data to the modern enterprise is no longer a topic of debate. The sheer
volume of data that organizations capture, store, and organize continues to grow at a
staggering pace. In an age of data, suddenly, every company is a data company. Although the
transformational potential of data is practically limitless, most companies still struggle to fully
realize the value of their data. So how do you transform into a data-driven organization?

Tableau is the trusted standard in modern analytics and business intelligence platforms,
enabling your entire organization to work smarter in its seamless end-to-end experience.
Tableau provides powerful and intuitive analytics for users of all skill levels while integrating with
your existing technology investments. 

Realizing the full value of your data means empowering everyone to make better decisions with
it, and this cannot be done simply by choosing the right technology. As you chart your course to
becoming a data-driven organization with Tableau, it’s important to remember that you are not
just deploying software—you are driving organizational transformation by prioritizing facts over
intuition with data at the center of every conversation. Your decisions should not only give
people the right tools, but they must also enable the development of new skills, create new
behaviors, encourage participation, and recognize achievements to alter how the organization
uses data every day.

Driving change across your organization requires effort and coordination of multiple
stakeholders and users with different and sometimes opposing—yet valuable—viewpoints and
interests. Orchestrating change, and doing it efficiently, requires executive advocacy, as well as
alignment and participation from a broad set of cross-functional participants to ensure the
needs of the entire organization are being met.

Tableau Blueprint is a step-by-step guide to becoming a data-driven organization, whether your

organization is new to modern, self-service analytics or you’ve already deployed and need to
broaden, deepen, and scale the use of data. Transforming how your company makes decisions
every day is no easy task, but incorporating data and analytics into decision-making cycles is
how you will see the most transformative impact on your organization. Achieving that level of
transformation requires a deliberate and holistic approach to developing your analytics
practice. Although every organization’s journey to developing a culture of self-service analytics
will differ, Tableau Blueprint outlines the processes and best practices from thousands of
customers.

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This topic explains the core capabilities, the repeatable processes to empower more people to
make data-driven decisions, and how to build a thriving data-driven mindset throughout your
organization.

Core Capabilities of Data-Driven Organizations

At the heart of every data-driven organization, you will find three core capabilities—agility,
proficiency, and community. The three capabilities are supported by organizational intent,
change management, and trust.

A consistent approach to governance establishes guardrails around data and content security,
access, and processes, allowing you to create a trusted and secure analytics environment for
every department, team, and person in the organization. Governance is central to all
successful self-service analytics initiatives, and it will help your organization start, grow, and
evolve the use of data and analytics.

Scaling these efforts also means measuring and proving their impact on the enterprise’s
transformational goals with data and analytics. This means understanding which metrics best
capture the cumulative impact of your iterative deployments, governance practices, increasing
analytical skillsets, and community growth. Suitable metrics—especially for measuring
behavioral changes—will vary for each organization, and should be evaluated at regular
intervals as analytics practices evolve.

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Agility
Deployments must possess agility by operating on iterative, repeatable processes that begin
with establishing a baseline architecture for a secure, stable, and trusted server platform. Given
that analytics become mission-critical, agile deployments with proactive monitoring will maintain
sufficient availability, capacity, and headroom while minimizing resource contention. Because
modern BI platforms often see fast growth, you will need to assess server utilization and user
engagement—and likely even change your topology—more frequently than with other
enterprise technology platforms in order to remain responsive to the increased use of data and
analytics.

This workstream is focused on deployment, monitoring, and maintenance, which are typically
IT-led efforts that rely heavily on understanding the broader business strategy and
requirements. 

l Deployment —Both Tableau Server (on-premises or public cloud) and Tableau Online

(fully-hosted SaaS) leverage your existing technology investments and integrate into your
IT infrastructure to provide a self-service, modern analytics platform for your users.  For
Tableau Server, your systems administrator along with the Tableau Server Administrator
will install and configure. For Tableau Online, you will work with select IT roles to integrate.
A desktop administrator will deploy client applications to licensed users of Tableau Desktop
and Tableau Prep Builder. For mobile use cases, Tableau Mobile can be published to your
organization’s mobile device management solution. Tableau Deployment on page 67
walks through the entire installation & configuration process and provides best practices
along the way.
l Monitoring — Data is critical to doing analytics at scale. Ongoing, proactive hardware and
application monitoring are required to deploy and operate Tableau and meet business
requirements and performance expectations of your user community. Without monitoring, a
“set it and forget it” mentality will likely be met with inadequate resources that fail to support

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the workload of highly-engaged users. Administrators should work together to ensure per-
formance and stability of the platform to meet evolving business needs. For more inform-
ation, see Tableau Monitoring on page 97.
l Maintenance — Regular maintenance activities will keep your Tableau deployment run-
ning in top condition. You will operationalize change management processes to support
the increased use of analytics, including performance tuning, load testing, capacity plan-
ning, and upgrades. Monitoring data will be the driver behind many maintenance
decisions. Tableau Maintenance on page 109 outlines activities and tools to keep your
deployment in optimal condition.

Proficiency
For people to skillfully analyze data that's relevant to their jobs to make decisions that drive the
business forward, they must develop proficiency. Beyond data capabilities, this also means
employees actively seek using data over decision-making by instincts or feelings. Maximizing
analytics investments and capitalizing on the transformative potential of data means that
everyone encountering it—regardless of skill levels and data fluency—must be able to turn
data into insights.

This workstream is focused on user education, measuring adoption and engagement, and
increasing data fluency within your organization through best practices.

l Education — To integrate modern analytics into the fabric of your company, it’s essential to
build a scalable and ongoing learning plans for all your users by evaluating their rela-
tionship to data. Tableau Education on page 119 will help you design and build the right
education programs for your organization.
l Measurement — Similar to the monitoring requirements to achieve agile deployment,
measurement helps Site Administrators understand user behaviors, such as who is cre-
ating and consuming content, which is important for managing and growing your team’s
use of analytics. For more information, see Measurement of Tableau User Engage-
ment and Adoption on page 135.
l Analytics Best Practices — Enable your users with the Cycle of Visual Analysis and repeat-
able processes for authoring content, then extend it with your own organizational stand-
ards. For more information, see Analytics Best Practices in Tableau on page 147.

Community
Community creates a network of users within your organization who use data to share and
collaborate. This will continue to drive adoption and learnings around analytics and the insights

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they discover. The community leader will coordinate efforts to document enablement
resources, connect users within your company, and generate enthusiasm among a group of
people founded on the common cause of putting data at the center of every conversation.
Internal user communities also benefit from integration with and support from the broader,
global Tableau Community.

This workstream is focused on enabling user growth and evangelizing analytics through
communications, engagement activities, and support.

l Communications — Establishing internal communications and user enablement resources

promotes adoption to scale data and analytics more efficiently by guiding their learning and
usage. Tableau Communications on page 173 outlines how to build a strong com-
munication channels, including an enablement intranet, analytics blog/newsletter, and dis-
cussion forums/chat.
l Engagement — While building excitement around the use of Tableau, engagement activ-
ities accelerate and reinforce the vision for modern analytics, and ultimately, fuel your organ-
izational transformation. Engagement activities are used to create and nurture an
environment for more productive, results-driven people. Tableau Community Engage-
ment on page 183 defines types of activities to cultivate a thriving user community, includ-
ing the internal user group meetings, knowledge transfer sessions, and competitions, as
well as external community activities.
l Support — As your user base grows, it is critical to put the appropriate processes in place to
efficiently and effectively support the user base. Tableau Support Processes on
page 191 defines the ways to support users with traditional helpdesk support requests,
Data Doctor, champion development, and mentoring.

Developing a comprehensive plan and approach for each of the topics within these three
workstreams will ensure that you are taking a holistic approach to accelerate company-wide
adoption of data and analytics.

Governed and Trusted Data

Governance is the combination of controls, roles, and repeatable processes that create trust
and confidence in data and analytics within your organization. In a traditional BI environment,
governance is often seen as a way to restrict access or lock down data or content. Because it is
commonly associated with traditional BI processes, there is a common misconception that
governance runs counter to a self-service, modern analytics environment; however,
governance takes on a different, yet equally important role in a modern analytics environment—
where governance enables and empowers your people, rather than restricts them.

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Simply put, governance makes self-service analytics possible. It provides the guidelines and
structure needed to properly protect data and content, but also provides the permissions and
access needed for a self-service environment to be successful. For this reason, a clearly
defined governance framework is the anchor point of every data-driven company. The
governance models you define will drive many decisions throughout the process—from
providing the guidance necessary for the three workstreams to move forward, to developing
the core capabilities to strengthen the data-driven decision-making in your organization.

For self-service analytics to scale, governance needs to be collaborative. Both IT and business
stakeholders on the project team are responsible for defining data and content governance. 
Shifting from an IT-led governance model does not mean IT relinquishes control so much as it
means allowing the business to be more self-reliant within a trusted environment. Modern BI
environments are implemented and scaled to benefit analysts and business users and as
such, these users should all participate in maintaining its overall quality, including becoming a
first line of defense in identifying data issues or irregularities within the agreed-upon
governance models.

Acknowledging that every organization is different, and every use case is different, varying
degrees of governance are required. The data and content governance models can be right-
sized and applied to any kind of data regardless of where it falls in the governance spectrum.
Establishing three primary governance models—centralized, delegated, and self-governing—
provides the flexibility to satisfy the governance needs of most organizations. Like other
Tableau platform management activities, an agile, iterative approach is needed to adapt to
new business requirements as user adoption and engagement increase across your
organization. For more information, see Tableau Governance Models on page 63.

A Repeatable Process for Tableau Blueprint

Tableau Blueprint is a step-by-step guide to becoming a data-driven organization. It provides
concrete plans, recommendations, and guidelines across critical foundational work and three
primary workstreams that will turn repeatable processes into core capabilities. These topics
will guide you through key decision points with a proven, repeatable, four-step process:

1. Discover — Gather information and perspectives from sponsors and multiple stakeholders
about your enterprise architecture, the use of data and analytics among business teams,
and analytical skills both present and needed.
2. Govern — Define controls, roles, and repeatable processes to make the appropriate data
and content available to the corresponding audience. 

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3. Deploy — Establish the iterative, repeatable processes across the three major workstreams
to install and configure software, educate users, and enable communications.
4. Evolve — Monitor platform utilization, measure user engagement, and host engagement
activities to promote and support the growing use of data and analytics.

For existing deployments, use this blueprint to assess your current capabilities—including
where you are excelling and where there are areas for growth and improvement.

Step 1: Discover
Tableau Blueprint includes the Tableau Blueprint Planner, a comprehensive planning asset
that will help you systematically gather the right information needed to link data with your
strategic initiatives, define your analytics strategy, discover analytics use cases, and assemble
the Executive Sponsor Roles and Responsibilities on page 21 and Tableau Project
Team Roles and Responsibilities on page 24. This will ensure you are evaluating the needs
of the organization holistically, so you can scope a vision and strategy that will suit your entire
organization and grow with you over time. After completing discovery, you should have a
greater sense of the direction you are headed with your analytics strategy and the roles needed
to execute on it. Discovery should be revisited as you expand to new users and use cases, but
having a clear view of the future state will help you make decisions as you move forward.

Step 2: Govern
As mentioned above, a clear approach to governance is a pivotal point in the process and must
be addressed early. Governance is pervasive throughout every workstream. The time invested
up front to collaboratively define governance gives people confidence to trust the data, use it
responsibly, and participate in the processes that surround it. Tableau Governance on
page 31 covers all aspects of governance in Tableau and help you determine the best
approach for your teams, data, and content. Working through the areas within data and content
governance, you will define standards, policies, and roles who perform the corresponding
actions and processes in the governance models.

Step 3: Deploy
To scale analytics across the organization with confidence, you need repeatable, iterative
processes in the deploy stage as you execute on your analytics strategy. During the initial
deployment, there needs be coordination among the cross-functional team members to install,
integrate, and configure the Tableau platform, educate users, and provide organization-specific

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enablement resources. After the initial deployment, you will onboard new teams and use cases
with education and communication.

Step 4: Evolve
Your analytics strategy needs to keep pace with the growth of users, skillsets, and use cases
across the organization. As processes evolve into capabilities, your users will adopt modern
analytics, and you will adapt your operating models by delegating more responsibilities over
time. The project team has access to several sources of information and data to tailor and tune
your analytics environment to changing business needs. The project team will be responsive to
the growing use of data and analytics among a diverse set of users by establishing a feedback
loop to monitor and measure key metrics, including the business value achieved.

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Analytics Strategy
To ensure success with your analytics investment, your organization needs a clearly defined
vision for deployment.  Inputs from people across the organization are crucial to understand the
short and long-term goals to promote data-driven decision-making. Your strategy must cover
people, process, and change management—including identifying immediate business use
cases, defining roles and responsibilities, and establishing a cadence to evaluate success
measurements and impact.

Valuable inputs from across the organization will help to guide your analytics deployment and
future state—including the roles, responsibilities, architecture, and processes, as well as the
success measurements to understand progress. After completing the Tableau Blueprint
Planner, you should have a greater sense of the direction you are headed with your analytics
strategy.

Discovery Process
The discovery process outlines a systematic approach to gathering information and
perspectives from sponsors and multiple stakeholders about roles and responsibilities,
enterprise architecture, and the use of data and analytics among business teams. Within each
section, the team or role responsible for completing is noted. Discovery is critical for gathering
information from sponsors and stakeholders to inform the organization’s analytics vision.

The Tableau Blueprint Planner contains questions you need to answer before deploying
Tableau broadly. Your answers will inform activities at every stage and every workstream in the
Tableau Blueprint. The following areas are covered within the planner:

l Analytics Strategy
l Roles and Responsibilities
l Enterprise Architecture Survey
l Data and Analytics Survey
l Use Cases and Data Sources
l Users
l Community

The Tableau Data and Analytics Survey on page 12, Tableau Use Cases and Data
Sources on page 13, and Tableau Users on page 17 sections of the planner should be

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revisited as you expand to identify new data use cases and users from new departments and
teams.

Tableau Roles and Responsibilities

The Roles & Responsibilities tab, found in the Tableau Blueprint Planner, helps to identify the
cross-functional sponsor and project team members. The individuals you select will be
responsible for understanding current/future state capabilities, goals, and challenges.
Depending on the size and scope of your deployment, the number of people may vary. For
more information on roles and responsibilities, see the Executive Advocacy and Project
Team on page 21.

Tableau Enterprise Architecture Survey

The Enterprise Architecture Survey assists IT with identifying what platforms and applications
will be connected to Tableau. Likely during the product evaluation period, some of the
questions about hardware platform, availability, security, and data were already considered,
but prior to enterprise-wide deployment, it will be beneficial to take a closer look at who owns
each system and coordinate resources needed to fully integrate Tableau within your
enterprise architecture. Even if you have an existing deployment, the survey can be helpful in
identifying gaps or what you might integrate next. For more information, see Tableau
Deployment on page 67.

Collect the following information about your enterprise architecture:

Hardware

l Where will you deploy - on-premises, public cloud, or hosted?

l What are your enterprise standard build/specs? (cores, VM, RAM)

l What is your enterprise server operating system?

Availability

l Is Tableau Server mission-critical, requiring requiring high availability?

l What is the recovery time objective (RTO)?

l What is the recovery point objective (RPO)?

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Security

l What is your enterprise authentication protocol? (Active Directory, LDAP, SAML)

l What is your security policy for service accounts related to Tableau Server?

Network

l Is SSL required?

l What is your policy on gateway ports over http/https?

l Are there any port restrictions?

l Is internet access from servers permitted?

l Will users access the server externally?

Operations

l What are your enterprise software management tools? (server, client, mobile)

l What are your enterprise monitoring tools? (SCOM, Splunk, etc.)

l How many environments do you require for servers? (dev, UAT, prod)

l What processes exist for backup/restore?

Client Software

l How is client software deployed - Desktop, Prep, Mobile?

External Services

l Will you be integrating external services (R Server, Python, MATLAB, WMS)?

Automation & Extensibility

l What are the requirements for automation, customization? (APIs needed)

Licensing

l What is the license type (role-based subscription, core, embedded)?

l Is there a chargeback model?

Data

l What database technologies (on-premises and cloud) are sources of data?

l What file-based sources of data will be used? (network folder access)

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l What security policies exist for database service accounts, user accounts?

l What are your classifications for data security? (secret, confidential, internal, public,
etc.)

l Do you have any data that is restricted to a geographic region?

l Are there external and/or government regulations to comply with?

l Are there row-level security requirements?

Tableau Data and Analytics Survey

For line-of-business leaders, the Data and Analytics Survey, found in the Tableau Blueprint
Planner, identifies key sources of data, how data is distributed and consumed, and what
analytical skills exist or need to be developed among their teams. Business teams who will be
using Tableau should complete the Data and Analytics Survey or work with an IT team
member to facilitate documentation of the information. Consider every source of data—from
CSV files, reports distributed via email, and local database files, to the enterprise data
warehouse, cloud applications, and external sources. This should be part of the onboarding
process as new teams are added.

Each Line-of-Business leader should survey their teams for the following information:

Data Selection and Management

l What business problems/questions need to be solved/answered?

l How does your team source data? (data warehouse, file exports, third-party)
l What are the key sources of data for the team?
l How often does the data change?

Security

l How is data secured?

Distribution

l How is data distributed?

l How frequently is data distributed?
l What formats are used?
l Who prepares reports for distribution?
l Who are the recipients?

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Consumption

l How is data consumed? New or replacement solution/report?

l Do consumers export and perform additional manipulation in context of your team?
l How is data used in context of recipient's job/role?

Skills

l What analytical skills and capabilities exist within the team?

l What analytical skills and capabilities need to be developed?
l Who will be identified and trained as the Tableau Champions within the team?

Tableau Use Cases and Data Sources

To identify initial use cases, the project team should complete the Use Cases and Data Sources
Worksheet, found in the Tableau Blueprint Planner, after the Tableau Data and Analytics
Survey on the previous page has been collected for each department/team to discover and
prioritize which sources of data will be most impactful for the participating business teams.
When prioritizing sources of data to publish and certify on Tableau Server, begin with low
complexity and high impact first to demonstrate quick wins. Publish and certify data sources,
create workbooks to answer business questions. As new data sources are identified, they can
be added over time. Beyond the initial use cases, this provides a repeatable process to add new
data sources as the deployment progresses.

Use Cases
If you are transitioning from a traditional top-down BI approach driven by IT or favor a phased
delegation of responsibilities to governed self-service, it is advantageous for IT or a centralized
BI team to build the initial use cases across departments, including certified data sources and
dashboards.

Over time, as analytical skills increase and users are encouraged to ask and answer their own
questions, the domain of available trusted content will grow organically into a wider range of
analytic content for self-service.

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From Initial Use Cases to Self-Service

Ideas for Initial Use Cases

In addition, Tableau provides Dashboard Starters for popular line-of-business applications to
accelerate content authoring. Content consumers can view and interact with the initial use
cases while they ramp-up their analytical skills. After they complete some training, the initial
use cases can become the starting point for build new content. Some common initial use cases
by department are listed below: 

l IT — Hardware/software asset inventory, helpdesk call volume/resolution time, resource

allocation, security patch compliance 
l Finance — Budget planning and spend, accounts payable, travel expenses 
l Marketing — Campaign engagement, web engagement, leads 
l Human Resources — Turnover rate, open headcount, new hire retention, employee
satisfaction 
l Sales — Sales/quota tracking, pipeline coverage, average deal size, win/loss rate 

l Facilities Operations — Physical locations, call center volume/workload distribution, work

request volume/resolution time 

For more solutions in industries and departments, see How People Use Tableau.

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Tableau Education Role Mapping

Your organization is full of people doing different things with data whether they recognize it or
not. Some use data to answer questions to drive their lines of business forward. Others prepare
spreadsheets and reports that they distribute within their department. Some others pull in raw
data from cloud applications or grab quick snapshots of important KPIs to use during team
meetings.

Each organizational role or job function has a relationship to data that you should identify and
map to Tableau roles. Assessing the skills required to operate Tableau in each organizational
role requires an understanding of which tasks can be completed with each product, plus an
understanding of how those products correlate to Tableau’s licenses that are detailed above.
As part of the discovery and planning work you’ll do upfront, you'll develop a plan for what
licenses you need for your near- and long-term roadmap with Tableau.

Current State Definition

During the discovery process, the Data & Analytics Survey helped you to identify how data is
distributed and consumed within a department and existing skills among team members. When
you review your survey results, it will be helpful to bucket users into those who distribute, derive,
or receive reports.

Future State Definition

Once the current state is understood, you should define the future state. Consider how you
users will interact with data to determine the license types and education roles needed.

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License Types
Using information discovered by the Data & Analytics Survey, you should assess each
organizational role’s relationship to data, categorize types of users, and determine the best fit
for education needs by license type. As the future state diagram shows, those who prepared
and distributed reports become Creators, and users who modify and combine existing reports
are likely Explorers. Viewers are content consumers. For more information see Tableau
License Types on page 93.

Education Role
We identified twelve Education Roles that map to prescriptive Learning Paths that will educate
employees in the skills needed to contribute to the growth of a data-driven organization. We
recommend that you review the education needs of different organizational roles even if you
decide to self-curate education resources or to consume training courses individually. For
more information, see Tableau Education on page 119 and related topics.

Enable a data culture in your organization: These roles establish cultural & technical
standards to align every Tableau user to the analytics goals of your organization.

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Provide insights and develop visualization solutions: These roles use the capabilities of
the Tableau platform to consume & create business solutions that range from ad-hoc
visualizations to embedded analytics.

Deploy and manage Tableau: These roles plan scalable deployments of Tableau Server or
Tableau Online and once in production, ensure that users can access what they need when
they need it.

Enter the corresponding job titles for each Education Role listed on the Education Role Mapping
tab of the Tableau Blueprint Planner. For more information on each Education Role, see Skills
by Tableau Education Role on page 119.

Tableau Users
With the audience size estimated in the Use Cases and Data Sources tab, you will drill-down
one more level to list users. The Users tab of the Tableau Blueprint Planner helps you track
individuals’ department, license level, learning path, and onboard date. Remember to
designate at least one champion per department. Later, you will publish these names in the
user directory on your Enablement Intranet, which is outlined in the Communications Guide. 
Collect the following information for each user or categorize by type of user:

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l Name
l Department
l License Level
l Site Role
l Learning Plan
l Onboard Date
l Tableau Champion?

Tableau Community Planning

The Community tab in the Tableau Blueprint Planner is focused on communications,
engagement activities, and support plans to connect people and nurture the use of analytics.
Your organization’s Tableau user community is just like Tableau’s Community, only on a
smaller scale. It’s comprised of all the Tableau users in your company. The community leader
will coordinate efforts to collect enablement resources and connect users within your company
and generate enthusiasm among a group of people founded on the common cause of putting
data at the center of every conversation.

Not all items listed on the Community tab are required for launch, and many will evolve over
time. The following areas should be assigned to an owner with a due date:

Communications

l Getting Started
l FAQ
l Support
l Announcements
l User Directory
l Governance Models
l Data Platforms
l Certified Data
l Analytics Best Practices
l Visual Style Guide
l Events Calendar
l Learning Plans
l Training Videos
l Company Education Calendar
l User Group Recordings

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l Analytics Blog/Newsletter
l Discussion Forums and Chat

Engagement

l Internal User Group

l Internal Admin Group
l Lunch & Learn
l Viz Games
l Tableau Day/Analytics Day

Support

l User Support Process

l Champion Development
l Skills Pyramid
l Mentoring

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Executive Advocacy and Project

Team
Becoming a data-driven organization requires more than just choosing the right technology
platform. It requires new skillsets, new processes, and changes in behavior from all users within
your organization. Enterprise deployment requires effort and coordination across multiple
stakeholders and users with different and sometimes opposing viewpoints and interests;
however, each one will provide their own valuable perspective. Orchestrating this change, and
doing it efficiently, requires buy-in, alignment, and participation from a broad set of cross-
functional stakeholders.

Executive sponsors working with the project team need to consider not only how to scale the
technology for the entire organization, but also the adequate support, training, change
management, and the ability to overcome any organizational roadblocks. Maximizing analytics
investments and capitalizing on the transformative potential of data means that everyone
encountering it—regardless of skill levels and data fluency—must be able to turn insights into
opportunities or innovations.

Forming the cross-functional steering committee and project teams is the first step towards
becoming a data-driven organization. The input and skillsets of executives, IT and business
stakeholders, and users are critical for buy-in, alignment, and ultimately, the project’s success.
Together, they will be able to shape your organization’s vision for modern analytics most
efficiently, working towards the common goal of making secure, governed data access a reality.

The topics in this section outline the key roles for building a culture of analytics and how they are
interconnected. The Roles and Responsibilities tab of the Tableau Blueprint Planner will help
you define and document your executive sponsor steering committee and project team
members.

Executive Sponsor Roles and Responsibilities

Before you deploy Tableau, you should identify executive sponsors. The executive sponsors
set the vision for modern analytics, align projects to transformational initiatives, nominate staff
for project and advocacy roles, and ensure accountability. They will serve as the governing
body for the use of Tableau. The executive sponsors may also be known as a Tableau Steering

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Committee, Tableau Council, or Analytics Executive Committee. Whatever name you choose,
this cross-functional executive team will:

l Communicate and sell the vision for modern analytics across the organization.
l Represent the interests of their respective departments to establish budget and funding.
l Align the use of analytics with strategic initiatives that drive organizational transformation.
l Approve Tableau Governance on page 31 processes, policies, guidelines, roles, and
responsibilities for managing the organization’s data in compliance with business and/or
regulatory requirements identified by the project team.
l Set the example of using facts over intuition by placing data at the center of every con-
versation in their department meetings as a visible and vocal user of the platform.

Given the diversity of use cases that arise within a company-wide initiative, the best way to
monitor progress is to evaluate how deeply data is ingrained in the day-to-day activities of the
organization and how it impacts business decisions. KPIs may include the following:
percentage of leadership engagement with Tableau content, such as content linked to
strategic initiatives; using analytics to run meetings; and measures of department/team
performance.

Initially, monthly meetings should be held to track the progress of the deployment and
influence their teams to adopt Tableau. After an operational routine is achieved, meetings can
transition to a quarterly cadence.

Depending on the size and scope of the deployment, the number of executive sponsors and
titles (C-level, VP, etc.) may vary. Potential members of the executive steering committee are
shown below.

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Note: Depending on your organizational structure, the Chief Data & Analytics Officer (CDAO) or
Chief Data Office (CDO) role and roles reporting into it may reside under IT.

Executive
Sponsor Responsibilities
Role

IT The IT Sponsor (CIO/CTO) is responsible for Tableau installation, configuration,

Sponsor and maintenance, partners with business leaders and SMEs, enables secure,
governed data access, and transitions content authoring to business users.

Specific IT KPIs may include the following: percentage of content authored by

business users vs. IT, percentage of data being available vs. analyzed.

Analytics The Analytics Sponsor (CDO) implements the vision for modern analytics,
Sponsor ensures the availability of data and content, establishes education plans and
learning paths by organizational job functions, facilitates communication
throughout the user community, and aggregates business value achieved.

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Executive
Sponsor Responsibilities
Role

Specific analytics KPIs may include the following: percentage of all users trained,
such as analytics skills in organization, percentage of users who increased
analytical skills.

Line-of- Line-of-Business Sponsors (CFO, CMO, etc.) advocate for data-driven decision-
Business making within their respective teams, promote content authoring and governed
Sponsors data access, encourage collaboration and sharing, and document business
value.

Specific LOB KPIs may include the following: percentage of users within a team
trained, amount of content published, user login frequency, days since last login,
users who logged in once and didn’t return.

Tableau Project Team Roles and Respons-

ibilities
The cross-functional project team includes IT/BI Professionals, Tableau Server and Site
Administrators, and selected Content Creators (Data Stewards and Content Creators). The
cross-functional project team is focused on the following:

l Establish and maintain the analytics practice, which includes defining Tableau
Governance on page 31 processes, policies, and guidelines.
l Define roles and responsibilities for managing the organization’s data in compliance with
business and/or regulatory requirements.
l Plan and execute the Tableau deployment and implement the organization’s vision for
modern analytics.
l Review policies and procedures periodically to adapt to and evolve with changing business
needs.

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Depending on the size of the organization and the degree of specialization for a particular role,
you may find that each of the roles listed below equates to one person in a large organization,
while more than one person may serve different roles in smaller organizations. What is most
important is that each role is filled at the time it’s needed—rather than the number of people on
the project team. The diagram below shows where the project team roles may sit in an
organizational hierarchy (in larger deployments, community leaders may reside in each of the
lines of business).

Note: Tableau Server supports multi-tenancy by allowing Server Administrators to create sites
for segregating users and content and delegating responsibilities for administrative tasks.

IT/BI Professional Roles

The IT/BI professional roles are collectively responsible for integrating Tableau with your
enterprise architecture and making data available in a secure, governed manner to Tableau
users. Whether IT and Analytics departments are combined or separate may vary from
company to company. Their involvement is critical to planning, installation, configuration, and
ongoing management and monitoring of the deployment.

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Initially, meetings should be held weekly or every other week to plan and track the progress of
the deployment with the full project team. After an operational routine is achieved, meetings
can transition to lesser frequency unless you are planning for upgrades, scaling server
infrastructure, or integrating with other systems.

IT/BI
Professional Responsibilities
Role

Analytics The Analytics Director owns the use of Tableau, including placement and fit
Director or of analytics within the organization, alignment with strategic initiatives, and
IT Service user enablement and adoption.
Owner

Enterprise The Enterprise Architect identifies technical requirements and integrates

Architect Tableau with enterprise architecture standards.

Security & The Security & Compliance Officer ensures the company complies with its
Compliance internal security and data security policies and external regulatory
Administrator requirements.

Database The Database Administrator is responsible for the administration,

Administrator monitoring, maintenance, and security of databases in the organization.
Coordinating with data engineers and data stewards, the DBA will provide
data access and assist with modeling, structuring, and optimizing sources of
data that connect to Tableau.

Systems The Systems Administrator installs, configures, manages, and maintains the
Administrator hardware and operating system on which the Tableau Server is installed in
the data center or the cloud, while enforcing company policies in compliance
with business and technology strategy.

Network The Network Administrator maintains network communications and

Administrator connectivity, including SSL, VPN, and mobile networking to access Tableau

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IT/BI
Professional Responsibilities
Role

Server.

Client The Client Administrator installs and configures client software including
Administrator database drivers, Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep Builder, and Tableau
Mobile.

Project The Project Manager ensures that the project is delivered on time and within
Manager budget by effectively staffing and managing relationships with a wide range
of groups, allocating and utilizing resources in an efficient manner, and
maintaining a cooperative, motivated and successful team.

Community The Community Leader coordinates efforts related to user enablement,

Leader including support resources, engagement events, connecting users within
your company, and analytics evangelism.

Note: Not all organizations will have a dedicated position for these
responsibilities.

Tableau Administrator Roles

Tableau Server Administrators are responsible for the operation of the server application, while
Tableau Site Administrators are responsible for their respective site(s), permissions, content,
and users, when sites are used.

Initially, weekly or biweekly meetings should be held to track the progress of the deployment,
server utilization, and user engagement with the full project team. After an operational routine is
achieved, administrator meetings can transition to monthly unless you are planning for
upgrades, scaling the server infrastructure, or enabling new functionality, such as mobile,
advanced analytics, or extensible features.

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Administrator
Responsibilities
Role

Tableau The Server Administrator has full access to Tableau Server settings, all
Server sites on the server, users and groups, and all content assets, such as
Administrator projects, data sources, and workbooks to monitor and maintain overall
server health.

KPIs for Tableau Server Administrators are outlined in Tableau

Monitoring on page 97.

Tableau Site Tableau Site Administrators create and manage the site’s users and
Administrator groups, create projects to organize content on the site, and assign
permissions to allow users (groups) to access the content. They also
promote and certify content and measure the use of analytics within their
site.

KPIs for Tableau Site Administrators are outlined in Measurement of

Tableau User Engagement and Adoption on page 135.

Tableau Content Creator Roles

Content creators include Data Stewards and Content Authors. It is important that the
individuals who are selected for the project team have a good understanding of their business
domain and data, as well as provide meaningful contributions to the development of
organizational policies and procedures. The content creators identified on the project team are
known as Tableau Champions. For more information, see Tableau Support Processes on
page 191.

During the initial deployment, data stewards and content authors should create certified data
sources and relevant workbooks for content consumers to use at launch. Any bottlenecks or
issues raised by this group should be shared with the full project team and/or executive
governing body for consideration and resolution, depending on the stage of the deployment.

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Initially, weekly, or biweekly meetings should be held to track the progress of the deployment,
server utilization, and user engagement with the full project team. Weekly meetings for content
creators should be held for sharing best practices, planning, and tracking the creation of
content, workflow design, and content utilization metrics. After an operational routine is
achieved, meetings can transition to a monthly cadence unless you are testing upgrades or
enabling new functionality, such as mobile, advanced analytics, or extensible features.

Content
Creator Responsibilities
Role

Data Data Stewards understand the business domain and the interaction of business
Stewards processes with analytics. A Data Steward ensures that there are documented
procedures and guidelines for data access and use and will work with the
Database Administrator and/or Data Engineers to plan and execute an
enterprise-wide data governance and compliance policy. Data Stewards should
have a Tableau Creator license.

Content Content Authors create and publish dashboards and/or data sources. They will
Authors also be a resource for others ramping up their Tableau skills. Content Authors
should have a Tableau Creator license.

Tableau Content Consumer Roles

Content consumers include everyone who uses Tableau to make data-driven decisions,
including licensed Creators, Explorers, and Viewers. While content consumers are not part of
the project team, it will be useful to solicit feedback from them periodically to understand their
ability to access data, create content, and make data-driven business decisions.

Content consumers will provide valuable feedback throughout your deployment and upgrade
cycles. The project team should collect their input during Tableau Community Engagement
on page 183 activities and Tableau Support Processes on page 191. If common problems
are surfaced, they should be addressed in the Getting Started and FAQ areas of the Tableau
Enablement Intranet on page 173.

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Tableau Governance
Perhaps the most important principle when adopting modern analytics is that self-service and
governance are not at odds with each other. Self-service is designed to enable everyone to ask
and answer their own questions using trusted data to make informed business decisions.
Governance is central to Tableau Blueprint because it is governance that makes self-service
possible. As the anchor point, governance will drive all decisions as the project team develops
agility, proficiency, and community across the organization.

Governance is the combination of controls, roles, and repeatable processes that creates trust
and confidence in data and analytics. Both IT and business stakeholders on the project team
are responsible for defining data and content governance together. In a successful self-service
environment, the appropriate levels of governance create accountability and enable, rather
than restrict, access to trusted content for users in your organization. Governance is a
spectrum—different kinds of data and content require different kinds of governance. It’s not a
one-time effort because skills and expectations will evolve. Periodically evaluating governance
processes will allow you to evolve and delegate more responsibilities as new analytical skills
and use cases develop.

In Tableau, you govern two things: data and content. Data governance ensures the accuracy of
the data driving your users’ decisions. Content governance helps business users to quickly and
confidently find, share, and use relevant workbooks and data sources. From soft guidelines to
firm boundaries for the usage of Tableau, organizations need to design their own governance
models that comply with their internal policies and procedures, and overall business needs.
Your organization’s governance models should encompass both data and content
management processes and the people who understand and comply with the established
controls. Like other Tableau platform management activities, an agile, iterative approach is
needed to adapt to new business requirements as user adoption and engagement increase
across your organization.

Defining the right balance of flexibility and control means you will realize the benefits of both
self-service and governance:

l Providing the right data to the right audience in a secure, governed operational model.
l Building the foundation for every data-driven decision.
l Establishing trust and confidence to drive business value.
l Documenting processes in a transparent, understandable, and easily-referenceable
format.

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l Contributing to the stability of the platform and reducing the proliferation of duplicate data
and content with governed workflows.

This document walks through the Modern Analytics Workflow and the role of governance
within it, the areas of governance you need to consider, and finally defining governance
models. Use this guide with the Data and Content Governance tab of the Tableau Blueprint
Planner to assist with establishing your organization’s standards, processes, and policies to
securely manage data and content.

Modern Analytics Workflow

The Modern Analytics Workflow empowers people to ask and answer their own questions with
data, enables people to easily share their insights with their team and the rest of the
organization, and ensures that the data supporting their decisions is accurate, trusted, and
secure. The workflow is comprised of five key actions: Access & View, Interact, Analyze &
Discover, Share, and Promote & Govern.

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Modern Analytics Workflow

The actions of the Modern Analytics Workflow are executed by the following roles:

l IT and/or BI Professionals — Tableau Server Administrators install, manage, monitor, and

maintain a Tableau deployment. Server Administrators, or by delegation to Site Admin-
istrators and/or Project Leaders, perform user provisioning, maintain security and per-
missions, and provide governance oversight.
l Content Creators — Tableau Creators are licensed with Tableau Prep Builder, Tableau
Desktop, and full Tableau Server authoring capabilities, including connecting to data, to cre-
ate content. Tableau Explorers perform all authoring within Tableau Server’s web authoring
with existing content. Site Administrators and Tableau Creators or Tableau Explorers with
the appropriate permissions can validate, promote, and certify content.
l Information Consumers — Tableau Viewers access, view, and interact with content in
Tableau Server, including desktop, tablet, and phone. Server and Site Administrators,
Creators, and Explorers can consume content as well.

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With increasing analytical skills, the boundaries between these roles become more fluid as
someone can switch from consuming to creating to promoting content, assuming the
appropriate license and permissions.

Governance in Tableau
Governance in Tableau is a critical step to driving usage and adoption of analytics while
maintaining security and integrity of the data. You must define standards, processes, and
policies to securely manage data and content through the Modern Analytics Workflow. Just as
important as defining these is having everyone in the workflow understand and comply so that
users will have trust and confidence in the analytics they’ll use to make data-driven decisions.

To define your organization’s Tableau Governance Models on page 63, you should work
through the areas of data and content governance that are outlined in the diagram below.

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Data Governance in Tableau

The purpose of data governance in the Modern Analytics Workflow on page 32 is to ensure
that the right data is available to the right people in the organization, at the time they need it. It
creates accountability and enables, rather than restricts, access to secure and trusted content
and for users of all skill levels.

Data Source Management

Data source management includes processes related to selection and distribution of data within
your organization. Tableau connects to your enterprise data platforms and leverages the
governance you already have applied to those systems. In a self-service environment, authors
and Data Stewards have the ability to connect to various data sources, build and publish data

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sources, workbooks, and other content. Without these processes, there will be a proliferation
of duplicate data sources, which will cause confusion among users, increase likelihood of
errors, and consume server resources.

Tableau’s hybrid data architecture provides two modes for interacting with data, using a live
query or an in-memory extract. Switching between the two is as easy as selecting the right
option for your use case. In both live and extract use cases, users may connect to your existing
data warehouse tables, views, and stored procedures to leverage those with no additional
work. 

Live queries are appropriate if you have invested in a fast database, need up-to-the-minute
data, or use Initial SQL. In-memory extracts should be used if your database or network is too
slow for interactive queries, to take load off transactional databases, or when offline data
access is required.

When publishing a workbook to Tableau Server, the author will have a choice to publish the
data source or leave it embedded in the workbook. The data source management processes
you define will govern this decision. With Tableau Data Server, which is a built-in component of
Tableau Server, you can share and reuse data models, secure how your users access data,
and manage and consolidate extracts with Published Data Sources. Further, Published Data
Sources allow Tableau Creator- and Explorer-licensed users to have access to secure, trusted
data in Tableau Server for web authoring and Ask Data. For more information, see Best
Practices for Published Data Sources, Edit Views on the Web, and Optimize Data for Ask
Data.

With increased data discovery capabilities, Tableau Catalog indexes all content, including
workbooks, data sources, and flows to allow authors to search for fields, columns, databases,
and tables in workbooks and published data sources. For more information, see Data
Management Add-on.

When Tableau Catalog is enabled, content authors can Search for Data by selecting from
Data Sources, Databases and Files, or Tables to search for data to see if it exists in
Tableau Server and helps to minimize duplication of data sources.

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In addition, the Data Details tab on view published to Tableau Server will provide consumers
with relevant information about the data used in it. Details include information about the
workbook (name, author, date modified), the data sources used in the view, and a list of the
fields in use.

For Data Stewards who create new Published Data Sources, the workflow below shows the two
major decision points that impact data source management—live or extract and embedded or
shared data model. This is not to imply that a formal modeling process must always occur
before analysis begins.

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To discover and prioritize key sources of data, use the Tableau Data and Analytics Survey
on page 12 and Tableau Use Cases and Data Sources on page 13 tabs in the Tableau
Blueprint Planner.

Key Considerations for Data Source Management

l What are the key sources of data for a department or team?

l Who is the Data Steward or owner of the data?
l Will you connect live or extract the data?
l Should the data source be embedded or published?
l Do variants of a dataset exist? If so, can they be consolidated as an authoritative source?
l If multiple data sources are consolidated, does the single data source performance or util-
ity suffer by attempting to fulfill too many use cases at once?
l What business questions need to be answered by the data source?
l What naming conventions are used for Published Data Sources?

Data Quality
Data quality is a measure of data's fitness to serve its purpose in a given context—in this case,
for making business decisions. The quality of data is determined by factors such as accuracy,
completeness, reliability, relevance, and freshness. You likely already have processes in place
to ensure data quality as it is ingested from source systems, and the more that is fixed in
upstream processes, the less correction will be needed at the time of analysis. You should
ensure data quality is consistent all the way through to consumption.

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As you are planning, it is a good time to review existing upstream data quality checks because
data will be available to a larger group of users under a self-service model. In addition, Tableau
Prep Builder and Tableau Desktop are great tools for detecting data quality issues. By
establishing a process to report data quality issues to the IT team or data steward, the data
quality will become an integral part of building trust and confidence in the data.

With the Tableau Data Management Add-on and Tableau Catalog, you should communicate
data quality issues to your users to increase visibility and trust in the data. You can set a warning
message on a data asset so that users of that data asset are aware of particular issues. For
example, you might want to let users know that the data hasn't been refreshed in two weeks or
that a data source has been deprecated. You can set one data quality warning per data asset,
such as a data source, database, flow, or table. For more information, see Set a Data Quality
Warning, including the following types: Warning, Deprecated, Stale Data, and Under
Maintenance.

Note that you can set a data quality warning using REST API. For more information, see Add
Data Quality Warning in the Tableau REST API Help.

Key Considerations for Data Quality

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l What processes exist for ensuring accuracy, completeness, reliability, and relevance?
l Have you developed a checklist to operationalize the process?
l Who needs to review data prior to it becoming shared and trusted?
l Is your process adaptable to business users and are they able to partner with data owners
to report issues?

Enrichment & Preparation

Enrichment and preparation include the processes used to enhance, refine, or prepare
raw data for analysis. Often a single data source does not answer all the questions a user may
have. Adding data from different sources adds valuable context. You likely already have ETL
processes to clean, combine, aggregate, and store data when ingesting raw data from various
sources. With command line interfaces and APIs, Tableau can be integrated with your existing
processes.

For self-service data preparation, Tableau Prep Builder and Tableau Prep Conductor, should
be used to combine multiple sources of data on a schedule. Tableau Prep Builder is part of the
Tableau Creator license, while Tableau Prep Conductor is part of the Tableau Data
Management Add-On. Tableau Data Management helps you better manage the data within
your analytics environment from data preparation to cataloging, search, and governance,
ensuring that trusted and up-to-date data is always used to drive decisions.

With visual, smart, direct feedback at every step, Tableau Prep Builder will help users to
prototype and prepare disparate sources of data for analysis. Once the steps are defined and
verified, the flow should be published to Tableau Server where Prep Conductor will execute the
flow and output a Published Data Source on the specified schedule. Automation creates a
consistent process, reduces error-prone manual steps, tracks success/failure, and saves time.
Users will have confidence in the output because the steps can be viewed on Tableau Server
or Tableau Online.

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Tableau Prep Flow

Tableau Prep Flow Published to Tableau Server

Key Considerations for Data Enrichment

l Will data enrichment and preparation be centralized or self-service?

l What organizational roles perform data enrichment and preparation?

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l What ETL tools and processes should be used to automate enrichment and/or pre-
paration?
l What sources of data provide valuable context when combined with each other?
l How complex are the data sources to be combined?
l Will users be able to use Tableau Prep Builder and/or Tableau Desktop to combine data-
sets?
l Have standardized join or blend fields been established by the DBA to enable users to
enrich and prepare datasets?
l How will you enable self-service data preparation?

Data Security
Data security is of utmost importance in every enterprise. Tableau allows customers to build
upon their existing data security implementations. IT administrators have the flexibility to
implement security within the database with database authentication, within Tableau with
permissions, or a hybrid approach of both. Security will be enforced regardless of whether
users are accessing the data from published views on the web, on mobile devices, or through
Tableau Desktop and Tableau Prep Builder. Customers often favor the hybrid approach for its
flexibility to handle different kinds of use cases. Start by establishing a data security
classification to define the different types of data and levels of sensitivity that exist in your
organization.

When leveraging database security, it is important to note that the method chosen for
authentication to the database is key. This level of authentication is separate from the Tableau
Server authentication (i.e. when a user logs into Tableau Server, he or she is not yet logging
into the database). This means that Tableau Server users will also need to have credentials
(their own username/password or service account username/password) to connect to the
database for the database-level security to apply. To further protect your data, Tableau only
needs read-access credentials to the database, which prevents publishers from accidentally
changing the underlying data. Alternatively, in some cases, it is useful to give the database
user permission to create temporary tables. This can have both performance and security
advantages because the temporary data is stored in the database rather than in Tableau.

In addition, extract encryption at rest is a data security feature that allows you to encrypt .hyper
extracts while they are stored on Tableau Server. Available as of 2019.3, Tableau Server
administrators can enforce encryption of all extracts on their site or enable users to encrypt all
extracts associated with particular published workbooks or data sources. For more
information, see Extract Encryption at Rest.

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You can limit which users see what data by setting user filters on data sources. This allows you
to better control what data users see in a published view based on their Tableau Server login
account. Using this technique, a regional manager can view data for her region but not the data
for the other regional managers. With these data security approaches, you can publish a single
view or dashboard in a way that provides secure, personalized data and analysis to a wide
range of users on Tableau Server. For more information, see Data Security and Restrict
Access at the Data Row Level.

Key Considerations for Data Security

l How do you classify different types of data according to its sensitivity?

l How does someone request access to data?
l Will you use a service account or database security to connect to data?
l What is the appropriate approach to secure data according to sensitivity classification?
l Does your data security meet legal, compliance, and regulatory requirements?

Metadata Management
Metadata management includes policies and processes that ensure information can be
accessed, shared, analyzed and maintained across the organization, as an extension of Data
Source Management. Metadata is a business-friendly representation of data in common terms,
similar to a semantic layer in traditional BI platforms. Curated data sources make fields
immediately understandable regardless of data store and table from which it was sourced and
hides the complexity of your organization’s modern data architecture.

Tableau employs a simple, elegant, and powerful metadata system that gives users flexibility
while allowing for enterprise metadata management. A metadata model can be embedded in a
workbook or centrally managed as a Published Data Source with Data Server. After connecting
to data and creating the data model, which will become a Published Data Source, look at it from
your users’ perspective and see how much easier analytics will be when they have a well-
formatted starting point, filtered and sized to the business questions it can answer. For more
information on Published Data Sources, visit Best Practices for Published Data Sources and
Enabling Governed Data Access with Tableau Data Server.

The diagram below shows where elements exist in Tableau’s metadata model:

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l Data Source — The Data Source has one or more live and/or extract connections and
attributes for the database, the tables, views and columns to use, and joins or custom SQL
used to access the data.
l Data Model — Upon connection, Tableau automatically characterizes fields as Dimen-
sions or Measures. In addition, the Data Model stores calculations, aliases, and formatting.
l VizQL Model — The VizQL Model enables users to adjust the role and aggregation of the
fields at run time. This enables one user to define the base Data Source and Data Model
as a collection of fields without needing to know, plan, or otherwise account for all the vari-
ations of analysis to be performed with the Data Source by other users.
l Catalog — Tableau Catalog discovers and indexes all of the content on Tableau Server,
including workbooks, data sources, sheets, and flows.

Data Stewards or authors with direct access to sources of data should prototype data sources
as an embedded data source in a Tableau workbook and then create a Published Data Source
in Tableau Server to share the curated metadata model.

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Direct Access Workflow

If authors do not have direct access to sources of data, they will rely on a DBA or Data Steward
to provide the prototype data source embedded in a Tableau workbook. After reviewing and
verifying it contains the needed data, a Site Administrator or Project Leader will create a
Published Data Source in Tableau Server to share the curated metadata model.

Restricted Access Workflow

The metadata checklist below shows best practices for curating a Published Data Source. By
establishing data standards using the checklist, you’ll enable the business with governed self-
service data access that is user-friendly and easy to understand. Prior to creating an extract or
Published Data Source in Tableau Server, review and apply the following checklist to the
metadata model:

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l Filter and size to the analysis at hand

l Use standard, user-friendly naming conventions
l Add field name synonyms for Ask Data
l Create hierarchies (drill paths)
l Set data types
l Apply formatting (dates, numbers)
l Set fiscal year start date, if applicable
l Add new calculations
l Remove duplicate or test calculations
l Enter field descriptions as comments
l Aggregate to highest level
l Hide unused fields

Beginning in 2019.3 in the Data Management Add-on,Tableau Catalog discovers and indexes
all of the content on Tableau Server, including workbooks, data sources, sheets, and flows.
Indexing is used to gather information about the metadata, schemas, and lineage of the
content. Then from the metadata, Tableau Catalog identifies all of the databases, files, and
tables used by the content on your Tableau Server. Knowing where your data comes from is
key to trusting the data, and knowing who else uses it means you can analyze the impact of
changes data in your environment. The lineage feature in Tableau Catalog indexes both
internal and external content. For more information, see Use Lineage for Impact Analysis.

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Using lineage, you can trace down to content owners at the end of the lineage graph. The list of
owners includes anyone assigned as the owner of a workbook, data source, or flow, and
anyone assigned as the contact for a database or table in the lineage. If a change is going to be
made, you can email owners to let them know about its impact. For more information, see Use
email to contact owners.

Key Considerations for Metadata Management

l What is the process for curating data sources?

l Has the data source been sized to the analysis at hand?
l What is your organizational standard for naming conventions and field formatting?
l Does the metadata model meet all criteria for curation, including user-friendly naming con-
ventions?
l Has the metadata checklist been defined, published, and integrated into the validation, pro-
motion, and certification processes?

Monitoring & Management

Monitoring is a critical piece of the self-service model as it allows IT and administrators to
understand how data is being used and be proactive and responsive about usage,
performance, and data connectivity and refresh failures. Depending on your company’s
database standards, IT will use a combination of tools and job schedulers for ingesting and
monitoring raw data and server health.

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Just as business users leverage data to make smarter decisions, administrators are also
empowered to make data-driven decisions about your deployment with Tableau Server’s
default administrative views and custom administrative views, which are made from analyzing
Tableau Server’s Repository data. Site Administrators will use Tableau’s Administrative Views
for monitoring the status of extract refreshes, data source utilization, and delivery of
subscriptions and alerts. For more information, see Tableau Monitoring on page 97 and the
Measurement of Tableau User Engagement and Adoption on page 135.

Key Considerations for Monitoring & Management

l Are schedules available for the times needed for extract refreshes?
l How is raw data ingestion monitored from source systems? Did the jobs complete suc-
cessfully?
l Are there duplicate sources of data?
l When are extract refreshes scheduled to run? How long do extracts run on server? Did the
refresh succeed or fail?
l Are subscription schedules available after extract refreshes have occurred?
l Are data sources being used? By whom? How does this compare with the expected audi-
ence size?
l What is the process to remove stale Published Data Sources?

Data Governance Summary

Striking the balance between control and agility is critical. In spite of stringent governance
policies, users often go the route of locally saving sensitive data and analytics for quick
analysis. In a self-service environment, the role of data governance is to permit access to data
to enable users to get the answers they need while ensuring security is enforced. Although
every organization has different requirements, the table below describes the ideal state for
governing self-service data access:

IT Administrators/
Area Content AUTHORS
BI Professionals

Data Source Provide access to sources of data and Define, manage, and update data
Management comply with organizational data models used for analysis.
strategy, policies, and procedures.

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IT Administrators/
Area Content AUTHORS
BI Professionals

Data Quality Define the process to validate data and Capture and expose data-
build trust in its accuracy for decision cleansing rules applied to
making. published data models.

Enrichment & Create ETL processes from multiple Capture and expose enrichment
Preparation sources of data to make data ready for and preparation rules applied to
analysis. published data models.

Data Security Define security parameters and access Comply with enterprise data
controls to published data models. security policies and external
regulations.

Metadata Define organizational policies and Define, update, and expose field-
Management processes for metadata management. level metadata for users.

Monitoring & Monitor and audit usage to ensure Monitor and track usage metrics
Management compliance and appropriate use of data of centrally-managed data
assets. models.

Content Governance in Tableau

As the use of analytics increases, a growing number of mission-critical business decisions will
become data-driven. The net effect is not only an increase in content volume but also in the
varying skill levels among its users who will be collaborating and uncovering valuable insights.
With more and more people using data daily, it is critical that Tableau content can be secured,
governed, and trusted—as well as organized so that people can discover, consume, and create
content with confidence. Without content governance, users will find it increasingly difficult to
find what they need among irrelevant, stale, or duplicate workbooks.

Content governance involves the processes that keep content relevant and fresh, such as
knowing when to decommission content because it’s not getting the expected traffic or finding
out why no one is using an important dashboard for decision-making. The responsibility of
ensuring compliance with an organization’s content governance policies is a core responsibility
of content authors.

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This section provides IT administrators and business users with the core concepts
underpinning Tableau’s content management features and guidance on how these concepts
should be applied to manage the content created in a thriving modern analytics platform.

Content Management
Defining a consistent content organization structure allows administrators to manage content
and makes content more discoverable by users. Tableau Server gives you the flexibility
needed to structure your environment and manage content based your specific governance
requirements.

To isolate content, you can organize content on separate sites. This is known as multi-tenancy.
Users of one site do not have access to another site or even awareness of its existence. Each
site can have unique users, data, and content. Sites work well when content can remain
completely separate during all phases, and there is little to no user overlap. Create a new site
only when you need to manage a unique set of users and their content completely separately
from all other Tableau users and content. While sites may appear easier initially to segment
data sources, workbooks, and users, carefully consider whether there will be shared content
across the organization. For more information, see Sites Overview (Windows | Linux).

Projects are a container for your workbooks, data sources, and flows, and help you to create a
scalable process for managing access to the content published to Tableau Server. They group
together items and behave much like folders to provide hierarchical organization. Projects and
nested projects are used to group similar content with the corresponding levels of permission
that administrators define. Permissions should be managed at the project level using groups
for simplified administration. For more information, see Use Projects to Manage Content
Access (Windows | Linux).

Content organization structure

Depending on your requirements, content can be managed by organizational (by

department/team), functional (by topic), or hybrid approaches. The deployment project team
should work together to create a content organization framework of different projects with
consistent naming conventions that include sandbox projects for ad hoc or uncertified content,

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and production projects for validated, certified content. In a self-service sandbox project
hierarchy, content authors can freely explore, author, and perform ad hoc analysis. Publishing
to the production project is limited to a small group of users who will validate, promote, and
certify content in this location as trusted for data-driven decision-making. As business users
create new content based on trusted data, these items will be certified and promoted to a
production project. The process of content validation, promotion, and certification is described
later in this document. This ensures that the organization’s primary data sources and
dashboards are constantly improving and evolving.

An example of project hierarchies for Marketing Production, Marketing Sandbox, and Marketing
Data Sources are shown below. You should carefully consider your content organization
approach with respect to security and permissions requirements. In the Marketing Production
and Sandbox project hierarchies, permissions are set by the administrator and locked, while
Published Data Sources in the Marketing Data Sources project are secured and permissioned
on each data source. Using this approach, Marketing workbooks can be secured to only the
Marketing department, and Marketing data sources can be accessed by specified groups
outside of Marketing who are granted permission to them. Having a separate sandbox
hierarchy supports content review and promotion requirements.

Departmental Project Hierarchy

To provide a place for all individuals to securely save their work on Tableau Server, you should
use a single Personal Sandbox and permissions to restrict content owners to only viewing their
own items. Once ready, the user can publish their content to the department sandbox for
validation, promotion, and certification process. This has the benefit of reducing administrative
overhead by reducing the number of projects to secure and manage. Apply the permission to
the Personal Sandbox project as shown below:

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1. Create the Personal Sandbox Project, and lock content permissions to the project.

Permissions locked to the project

2. Set permissions for All Users to Publisher on the project, None for workbooks, and none for
data sources.

Publisher only permissions

With Personal Sandbox content in a single location, administrators can monitor how often
content is viewed, suggest owners delete stale content, and check who is making the most use
of the Personal Sandbox. Content owners can always see the content they own, even if it’s
published in a project where they are denied the ability to view workbooks and data sources.
Authorization is explained in more detail in the next section.

Key Considerations for Content Management

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l Will workbooks and data sources be shared across the company?

l Will sites be used to isolate sensitive content or departments?
l Will projects use an organizational (departments/teams), functional (topics), or hybrid
approach?
l Have sandbox and production projects been setup to support ad-hoc and validated con-
tent?
l Are content naming conventions used?
l Are authors publishing multiple copies of the same workbook with different filters selected?
l Does content have a description, tags, and comply with visual styles?
l Do you have a load time expectation and an exception procedure in place?
l After employees leave the company, what is the process to reassign content ownership?

Authorization
When a user attempts to login to Tableau Server, authentication verifies a user’s identity.
Everyone who needs access to Tableau Server must be represented as a user in Tableau
Server’s identity store (Windows | Linux). Authorization refers to how and what users can
access on Tableau Server after the user has been authenticated. Authorization includes:

l What users are allowed to do with content hosted on Tableau Server, including site, pro-
jects, workbooks, views, and data sources.
l What tasks users are allowed to perform to administer Tableau Server, such as configuring
server settings, running command line tools, creating sites, and other tasks.

Authorization for these actions is managed by Tableau Server and determined by a

combination of the user's license type, site role, and permissions associated with specific
entities such as workbooks and data sources. Tableau’s role-based licenses have implicit
governance built in because of the capabilities that are included with them. For more
information on specific capabilities by each license, see Tableau for Teams and Organizations.

When you add users to a site on Tableau Server, independent of their license type, you must
apply a site role to them. The site role signifies the maximum level of access a user can have on
the site.

Users with a Tableau Creator license have access to Tableau Server, Tableau Desktop,
Tableau Prep Builder, and Tableau Mobile. The following site roles use a Tableau Creator
license:

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Site Role Description

Server Configure settings for the Tableau Server, all sites on the server, users and
Administrator groups, and all content assets, such as projects, data sources (including
connection information), and workbooks.

Connect to Tableau Published Data Sources or external data, from the

browser, Tableau Desktop, or Tableau Prep Builder; create and publish new
data sources; author and publish workbooks.

Site Unrestricted access to content as described above, but at the site level.
Administrator Connect to Tableau or external data in the browser, Tableau Desktop, or
Creator Tableau Prep Builder; create new data sources; build and publish content.

On Tableau Server, server administrators can determine whether to allow

site administrators to manage users and assign site roles and site
membership. By default, on Tableau Server, and always on Tableau Online,
site administrators are allowed these capabilities.

Creator Connect to data to author new data sources and dashboards, which are
published and shared on Tableau Server. Data Stewards (DBA or data
analyst) publish data sources. Creators incorporate process definitions,
policies, guidelines, and business knowledge for enterprise metadata
management in compliance with organizational and/or regulatory
obligations.

Users with a Tableau Explorer license have access to Tableau Server and Tableau Mobile.
The following site roles use a Tableau Explorer license:

Site Role Description

Site Same access to site and user configuration as Site Administrator Creator
Administrator but cannot connect to external data from the web editing environment.
Explorer
Connect to Tableau Published Data Sources to create new workbooks and
edit and save existing workbooks.

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Site Role Description

Explorer Publish new content from browser, browse and interact with published
(Can views, use all interaction features. In the web editing environment, can edit
Publish) and save existing workbooks, and save new standalone data sources from
data connections embedded in workbooks, but cannot connect to external
data and create new data sources.

Explorer Browse and interact with published views. Can subscribe to content, create
data driven alerts, connect to Tableau Published Data Sources and open
workbooks in the web authoring environment for ad-hoc queries, but they
cannot save their work.

Users with a Tableau Viewer license have access to Tableau Server and Tableau Mobile.

Site
Description
Role

Viewer View and interact with filters content. Viewers can also receive alerts triggered by
business events.

Users who have been added to Tableau Server but without a license are Unlicensed.

Site Role Description

Unlicensed Unlicensed users cannot sign in to Tableau Server or Tableau Online.

Site roles along with content permissions determines who can publish, interact with, or only view
published content, as well as who can manage the site’s users and administer the site itself. The
project team should work together to define the content permissions model. Tableau Server
and/or Site Administrators will assign permission rules to groups and lock them to the project.
Locked projects enforce permission rules on all content within the container, including nested
projects. For more information, see Set Project Default Permissions and Lock the Project.

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Tableau has default permission rules for projects, workbooks, and data sources, or you can
define custom permission rules for these content types.

Permission
Rules Description
Template

Project Combined with the appropriate site role, allows the user or group full access to
Leader the project, its child projects, and content published into that project hierarchy.

Editor Allows the user or group to connect to, edit, download, delete, and set
permissions for data sources or workbooks in the project.

They can also publish data sources, and provided they are the owner of a data
source they publish, can update connection information and extract refresh
schedules. This permission is relevant for views when the view they access
connects to a data source.

Publisher Allows the user or group to publish workbooks and data sources to the project.

Connector Allows the user or group to connect to data sources in the project.

Viewer Allows the user or group to view the workbooks and views in the project.

None Sets all capabilities for the permission rule to Unspecified.

Denied Sets all capabilities for the permission rule to Denied.

Custom permissions allow more granularity in permissions—from accessing or downloading a

data source to how a user interacts with published content. Tableau’s intuitive interface makes
it easy to associate users to functional groups, assign permissions to the groups, and see who

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has access to which content. For more information, see Set Permissions on Individual Content
Resources

You should create groups locally on the server or import from Active Directory/LDAP and
synchronize (Windows | Linux) on a set schedule. Synchronization schedules are set by the
Tableau Server Administrator. To simplify maintenance, assign permissions to groups at the
project level as shown below.

Tableau Server Custom Permissions

For more information, see Set-up Permissions Quick Start, Configure Projects, Groups, and
Permissions for Managed Self-Service, and Permissions Reference.

Key Considerations for Authorization

l What is the minimum site role for Active Directory/LDAP group synchronization?
l Have you set all permissions for the All Users group in the Default project to None?
l Are any explicit restrictions (Deny permissions) needed on the All Users group to propagate
to every user account?
l Have you created groups that correspond to a set of authoring and viewing capabilities for
each project?
l Have you reviewed effective permissions on select users to test your permissions model?
l Have you locked permissions at the parent project to maintain security throughout the pro-
ject hierarchy?
l Have service account usernames/passwords been established for Published Data
Sources?

Content Validation
Content validation is the first step in a series of events that will culminate in content certification.
Similar to the data quality area in data governance, content validation encompasses the

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processes to validate that content is accurate, complete, reliable, relevant, and recent.

The first role to validate content should be its author. Authors should solicit feedback from the
target audience as well. This can be done in an informal feedback group or by sharing a link to
the workbook. Data Stewards should also play a role to ensure correctness and review an
embedded data source as a potential candidate for publishing and certifying. If the data source
is embedded in the workbook, the Data Steward should consider whether it is a potential
candidate for publishing and certifying. Beyond data and calculation correctness, content
validation should also include a review of the branding, layout, formatting, performance, filters,
dashboard actions, and edge case behaviors by the Site Administrator or Project Leader site
roles.

Key Considerations for Content Validation

l Who is involved in the validation process?

l Is the workbook accurate, complete, reliable, relevant, and recent?
l Does the new content replace existing content?
l Are the underlying data and calculations correct?
l Does the workbook reflect corporate branding?
l Does the workbook have a logical layout?
l Are all axes and numbers formatted correctly?
l Do dashboards load within the acceptable performance time?
l Do filters and dashboard actions behave on the targeted views?
l Does the dashboard remain useful in edge case behaviors (filtered to all, none, one value,
etc.)?

Content Promotion
After content validation is complete, the process of content promotion is used to publish the
workbook to a trusted project location or add the certification badge designation for Published
Data Sources. An example of a workbook workflow is shown below.

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Workbook Workflow

Content authors will connect to data, create new dashboards, and publish to the sandbox
project. Site Administrators or Project Leaders will validate and approve the content. The
approved content will be published to the production project. The Content Migration Tool,
licensed as part of the Tableau Server Management Add-on, provides an easy way to promote
or migrate content between Tableau Server projects. You can do this between projects on
separate Tableau Server installations (for instance, between a development instance of
Tableau Server and a product installation), or between projects on a single Tableau Server
installation. The Content Migration Tool User Interface walks you through the steps necessary
to build a "migration plan" that you can use a single time, or as a template for multiple
migrations.

If IT requirements mandate three separately licensed environments (Dev, QA, and Production),
try not to replicate a traditional waterfall development cycle with a modern analytics platform.
Users may favor the QA environment to circumvent stringent policies or delays to get content
into production, so work towards a good balance by automating content migration to the
production server with custom workflow scripts using Tableau’s REST APIs.

Key Considerations for Content Promotion

l Who is involved in the promotion process?

l Do content-promoting roles have a checklist of criteria to evaluate?
l Have you clearly delineated between certified content and ad-hoc content by projects?
l Is the process agile to support iterations and innovation?
l Do you have workflows to address both direct and restricted sources of data and work-
books?

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Content Certification
After content has been validated and promoted, it achieves a trusted, certified status when a
Site Administrator, Project Leader, or a Publisher (content author or Data Steward) with
permission to the production project promotes the workbook or data source to the designated
location. Certification makes content discoverable by content consumers and improves Data
Stewards’ abilities to govern enterprise-wide data more effectively in Tableau by reducing the
proliferation of duplicate workbooks and data sources.

Use the baseline requirements that were established in key considerations for content
validation as the criteria for becoming certified. Content authors should have a clear
understanding of how the certification process works from start to finish, and content
consumers should know where certified content is published in the production project, as
defined by your content management standards.

Data source certification enables your Data Stewards to promote specific data sources in your
Tableau deployment as trusted and ready for use. Certified Data Sources get preferential
treatment in Tableau Server search results and in our smart data source recommendations
algorithm so that they are discoverable and easily reusable.

Certified Data Source

Key Considerations for Content Certification

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l Who is responsible for designating certified content?

l Have all criteria for achieving certification status been met?
l Are all fields completed: about, certification notes, tags?

Content Utilization
Content utilization is a measurement of the effective use of the data for business decisions, but
the complete picture cannot be told through Traffic to Views alone. Measurement of content
utilization helps your deployment to operate at scale and evolve by understanding user
behaviors—who creates and consumes content, and the quality and relevance of the
dashboards and data sources. If content isn’t being consumed, you will be able to identify it, and
take the appropriate next steps.

Server Administrators should monitor broad usage patterns across the organization. Site
Administrators should measure and audit usage of published content—both certified and ad-
hoc—within their site. For example, if ad-hoc content utilization is significantly higher than
certified content utilization, perhaps the promotion process is too restrictive or takes too long for
business needs.

Site Administrators should review content utilization in the context of the expected audience
size that were documented on theTableau Use Cases and Data Sources on page 13 tab of
the Tableau Blueprint Planner. Individual content authors should also review utilization for their
content in the sparkline tooltip by hovering over the workbook’s thumbnail or selecting Who Has
Seen This View from the menu. For more information, see the Measurement of Tableau
User Engagement and Adoption on page 135.

Key Considerations for Content Utilization

l How much traffic goes to each view?

l What is the definition of stale content? How often is stale content purged?
l How much indirect utilization (alerts & subscriptions) occurs?
l Are subscriptions delivered on time?
l Does the actual audience size match with expectations?
l Does content follow a weekly, monthly, quarterly trend?
l What is the frequency of login or days since last login by user cohort?
l What is the distribution of workbook and data source size?

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Content Governance Summary

The table below defines the ideal state for promoting and governing content in a thriving
modern analytics deployment:

Area IT Administrators/BI Professionals Content AUTHORS

Content Create and maintain an environment Ensure content is relevant in their

Management for storing and organizing published site or project.
content.

Security & Secure analytic content and grant Comply with organizational
Permissions users the appropriate levels of access security and permissions policies.
based on content type, sensitivity,
business need, etc.

Content Define process for validating content is Access platform capabilities to

Validation correct. assist with validation and accuracy
verification of user- generated
analytic content.

Content Define process for promoting content. Promote validated analytic content
Promotion to centralized-trusted environment
as determined by governance
process.

Content Define process for certifying content. Certify content as trusted and
Certification delineate from untrusted content
in the same environment.

Content Measure broad usage patterns across Measure and audit usage of
Utilization organizational business units. published content and track usage

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Area IT Administrators/BI Professionals Content AUTHORS

of untrusted content.

Tableau Governance Models

Acknowledging that every organization is different, and every use case is different, varying
degrees of governance are required. The data and content governance models can be right-
sized and applied to any kind of data regardless of where it falls in the governance spectrum.
Establishing three primary governance models—centralized, delegated, and self-governing—
provides the flexibility to satisfy the governance needs of most organizations.

Like other Tableau platform management activities, an agile, iterative approach is needed to
adapt to new business requirements as user adoption and engagement increase across your
organization. Processes will change over time as skills increase and responsibilities are
delegated more broadly than the IT organization. Establish governance review points twice a
year to continue to evolve the models.

The Data and Content Governance tab in the Tableau Blueprint Planner will help you to define
your organization’s governance models based on information collected in the Tableau
Enterprise Architecture Survey on page 10 and Tableau Data and Analytics Survey on
page 12. You should establish and document who is responsible and what processes support
each area within each model: centralized, delegated, and self-governing.

Using the matrix approach to separate data and content governance and segmenting by the
three models, it is easy to mix and match across models. For example, data and content
governance may be centralized at the start. Then, after user training, data governance areas
may be centralized, but content governance is delegated or self-governing because the data is
curated. Similarly, specific areas within data and content governance can be tailored, such as
delegated metadata management and centralized security and permissions, to meet your
unique requirements. As business users’ analytical capabilities grow, more responsibilities can
be delegated over time. Once defined, the governance models should be communicated with
the user community by publishing them to the enablement intranet. For more information, see
Tableau Enablement Intranet on page 173.

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Centralized
In a centralized model, IT or another authority owns data access and produces data sources
and dashboards for business consumption in a one-to-many manner by a small number of
Creators and everyone else as Viewers. Centralized governance is required for maintaining
control of highly sensitive data.

Addressing a skills gap among the target audience is another case where centralized
management is necessary. You can still provide business users with prepared content to make
data-driven decisions while they build their analytical capabilities.

If you are transitioning from a traditional, top-down analytics approach driven by IT or favor a
phased delegation of responsibilities to governed self-service, it may be advantageous for IT
or a centralized BI team to build the initial use cases across departments, including Certified
Data Sources and dashboards.

Over time, as users are encouraged to ask and answer their own questions, the domain of
available trusted content will grow organically with the teams and departments, and users will
have access to a wider range of analytic content for self-service. To avoid the risk of recreating
a “report factory” delivery model, establish goals and dates to evolve beyond the centralized
governance model and to begin delegation of responsibilities.

Delegated
In a delegated governance model, new roles are introduced outside of IT or a central authority.
Site Administrators and Data Stewards are identified and may have direct access to sources of
data. Content authors have access to certified Published Data Sources to ask and answer their
own business questions, while some content consumers are given web authoring capabilities
to save derivative content to sandbox projects. Processes to validate, promote, and certify
content are introduced but still may be limited. There is increasing collaboration between IT
and business users as IT shifts from a provider of reports to an enabler of analytics.

Self-Governing
In a self-governing model, there is strong collaboration between IT and business users.
Certified content and data sources are available, and ad-hoc content is being created regularly
by Creators and Explorers. Viewers understand the delineation between certified and ad-hoc,
sandbox content states. The process of validation, promotion, and certification is well-defined
and well-understood by users of all skill levels. With increasing analytical skills across the
organization, the boundaries between the roles of the Modern Analytics Workflow are fluid as

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users switch from consuming to creating to promoting content with the appropriate level of
permissions.

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Tableau Deployment
Prioritizing data and analytics couldn’t come at a better time. Your company, no matter what
size, is already collecting data and most likely analyzing just a portion of it to solve business
problems, gain competitive advantages, and drive enterprise transformation. With the explosive
growth of enterprise data, database technologies, and the high demand for analytical skills,
today’s most effective IT organizations have shifted their focus to enabling self-service by
deploying and operating Tableau Server at scale, as well as organizing, orchestrating, and
unifying disparate sources of data for business users and experts alike to author and consume
content.

Tableau Server leverages your existing technology investments and integrates into your IT
infrastructure to provide a self-service, modern analytics platform for your users. During the
discovery stage, IT completed the Tableau Blueprint Planner’s Tableau Enterprise
Architecture Survey on page 10 and collected the Tableau Data and Analytics Survey on
page 12 from departments and teams within your organization. The Enterprise Architecture
Survey helps you identify your enterprise standards and processes for technology and
platforms that you will integrate with Tableau. Depending on your organizational roles and
responsibilities, Tableau Server should be installed by a systems administrator and the
designated Tableau Server Administrator in coordination with the corresponding IT roles. The
Data & Analytics Survey, completed by business teams, identifies and prioritizes data use
cases, audience size, and users. You will use the information collected in both surveys to plan
your deployment strategy, including sizing, installation, and configuration of your Tableau
Server. In addition to installing Tableau Server, administrators will also need to plan for
installation of Tableau Prep Builder, Tableau Desktop, and Tableau Mobile, where applicable.

This document covers system integration and deployment best practices. It will help you plan
your deployment strategy. Prior to installation, review Planning (Windows | Linux) and Baseline
Configurations (Windows | Linux). For full documentation, visit Get Started with Tableau Server
(Windows | Linux).

Tableau Server Architecture

Tableau Server is a collection of processes that work together to provide a full modern analytics
platform for your users. Multiple server processes work together to provide services in various

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tiers. To learn how the processes work together, see Tableau Server Processes on Tableau
Public.

For more information on specific processes, see below:

l Tableau Server Administration Agent

l Tableau Server Application Server
l Tableau Server Backgrounder Process
l Tableau Server Cache Server
l Tableau Server Client File Service
l Tableau Server Coordination Service
l Tableau Server Data Engine
l Tableau Server Data Server
l Tableau Server File Store
l Tableau Server Gateway Process
l Tableau Server Microservice Containers
l Tableau Server Repository
l Tableau Server SAML Service
l Tableau Server Search and Browse
l Tableau Server Service Manager
l Tableau Server Administration Controller Process
l Tableau Server TSM Maintenance Services
l Tableau Server VizQL Server
l Tableau Prep Conductor
l Tableau Server Dynamic Topology Changes
l Server Process Limits

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Hardware Platform
Tableau Server can be installed on-premises with physical or virtual machines or in the cloud
and supports Windows or Linux operating systems. To determine your hardware platform and
sizing, consider these variables: your environment, sources of data and management to
provide self-service data access, potential workload from all users, and actual usage data. If
this is the first time you are deploying Tableau Server, you should focus on your environment
standards and sources of data. For existing deployments, you will analyze Tableau Server data
to evaluate workload and usage in addition to environment and sources of data.

Deployment Type
Tableau prioritizes choice in flexibility to fit, rather than dictate, your enterprise architecture.
With on-premises, cloud, and hosted options, there is a version of Tableau to match your
requirements. Below is a comparison of the three types:

Type Pros Cons

Tableau Server - Full control of hardware and Need dedicated administrators to

On Premises software manage hardware and software

Infrastructure and data remain Additional infrastructure needed to

behind your firewall access off-network (mobile, external)

Tableau Server - Full control of software on Need dedicated administrators to

Public Cloud managed hardware manage software
(IaaS)
Puts infrastructure in same Additional infrastructure needed to
place as data (for migration to access off-network (mobile, external)
cloud)

Flexibility to spin up/down

hardware as needed

Tableau Online Fully hosted solution (hardware, Single-site in multi-tenant

(SaaS) software upgrades) environment

Fast to deploy Connection to on-premises data

handled through Tableau Bridge
Easy for external audience to

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Type Pros Cons

access Authentication via SAML or Tableau

ID

Hardware requirements
Regardless of where you choose to deploy Tableau Server, properly-sized hardware is critical.
Your planning should be aligned with evolving business needs by assessing server utilization
and user engagement more frequently, scaling more frequently, and changing topology more
frequently than other software applications. Review the corresponding link to the hardware
platform that fits your enterprise standards:

l Recommended Baseline Configurations (Windows | Linux)

l Tableau Server on VMware VSphere
l AWS Instance Type and Size (Windows | Linux)

l Google Compute Engine Virtual MachineType and Size  (Windows | Linux)

l Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine Type and Size  (Windows | Linux)

l Alibaba Cloud ECS Instance Type and Size (Windows | Linux)

If you deploy Tableau Server in the cloud, using Dedicated Hardware and static allocation of
RAM eliminates varied performance due to resource contention. If cost is a consideration,
Virtual Hardware is also viable. We recommend testing your own infrastructure to find the
configuration that best fits your needs. For an example of how to conduct such a test, please
see the Tableau at the Speed of EC2 Whitepaper. (This experiment was conducted in AWS,
but the testing theory extends to any cloud provider.)

Initial Sizing
Your Tableau account team is available to assess your requirements and assist with sizing. In
an initial deployment of Tableau, you should estimate 600-800 Explorers per 8-core node,
assuming 10% active users (interactive, concurrent requests made to Tableau Server,
including consuming dashboards on a laptop or mobile device, web authoring, and connecting
to and querying Published Data Sources). This is only a starting point and should not be
considered a hard sizing rule beyond the initial deployment. Memory should be at least 8GB of
RAM per core for a production server. For less than 40-core clusters, use 8-core nodes, and in
clusters greater than 40-cores, use 16-core nodes. The relative workload of each license type

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must be factored into hardware sizing. Assuming an Explorer counts as 1 user, a Creator has a
relative workload of 2.4 users, while a Viewer has a relative workload of 0.75 of a user. Using
these workload coefficients, you can estimate the cluster’s capacity. The following table shows
examples of equivalent workloads on each row:

Creators Explorers Viewers

Workload 1 25 300 586

Workload 2 50 333 462

Workload 3 75 234 514

Workload 4 100 171 518

Actual workload of Creators, Explorers, and Viewers may vary with usage of Tableau Server
features, such as frequency of connecting to data and web authoring, as well as viewing and
interacting with content. As users are onboarded and start creating and consuming content, you
should monitor the hardware and content utilization to make informed decisions on server
sizing with data from hardware monitoring tools and Tableau Server’s Repository. For more
information, see Tableau Monitoring on page 97 and Measurement of Tableau User
Engagement and Adoption on page 135

Scalability
In both new and existing deployment scenarios, the goal is to proactively maintain sufficient
availability, capacity, and headroom and minimize resource contention. Like other enterprise
platforms, Tableau Server scales up by adding processor, memory, and/or disk or scales out by
adding more nodes to a cluster. Tableau Server scales nearly linearly with the addition of
hardware resources, according to your unique environment, data, workload, and usage mix.
Load testing and capacity planning should be conducted regularly, as outlined in Tableau
Maintenance on page 109.

Scalability and performance are heavily dependent on external systems, such as sources of
data, volume of data, and network speeds, user workloads, and workbook design, which can
change rapidly as deployments progress. For example, assuming a correctly-sized hardware
configuration for the initial deployment, unplanned user onboarding, unmonitored utilization,
inefficient workbooks, suboptimal data extract design, and peak-hour refresh schedules can
have a major impact on server performance and user experience, causing performance to

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degrade from the cumulative effect of the separate incidents. For more information, see
Tableau Server Scalability whitepaper.

When deploying Tableau Server in the cloud, you can leverage all existing scaling abilities of
the Tableau platform including Hot Topology. With a simple restart of the server, you can also
change the underlying machines supporting the platform as long as their Public IP Address
does not change.

For single-node deployments, you may also turn off Tableau Server machines during
downtimes to reduce machine costs. Doing so with a multi-node cluster will put Tableau in a
degraded state. But you can utilize Hot Topology to responsively adjust Tableau Server
process allocation, allowing you to tune the balance of machine costs and capacity needs.
Auto-scaling functionality that terminates or instantiates machines based on demand is not
supported.

Server Environments
In addition to your production environment, Tableau recommends one test environment for
testing upgrades and server topology changes. Your production environment will support
modern analytics using production and sandbox projects with content validation, promotion,
and certification processes—all in one environment. For more information on these content
management processes, see Tableau Governance on page 31. The production and test
environments should have identical hardware specs, server topology, and configuration. This
will allow administrators to test upgrades and participate in beta programs in the test
environment by restoring back production content.

Some organizations have IT policies that require three environments—Development, QA, and
Production—to isolate use cases for content development, testing and consumption into
separate Tableau Server installations. If this is a requirement for your organization, each of the
three environments must be licensed separately as they would be considered three Production
Environments as defined in Tableau's End User License Agreement. The Production and QA
environments should have identical specs, server topology, and configuration. If you are
required to run three separate environments, try not to replicate a traditional waterfall
development cycle with a modern analytics platform. Users may favor the QA environment to
circumvent stringent policies or delays to get content into production, so work towards a good
balance by automating content migration to the production server with the Content Migration
Tool found in the Tableau Server Management Add-on or custom workflow scripts using
Tableau’s REST APIs. The development environment does not have to have identical

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hardware specs as the production and QA environments, unless the development environment
is used for upgrade testing or participation in beta programs.

High Availability
You should install and configure Tableau based on your availability requirements and add
additional nodes for capacity and/or for high availability (Windows | Linux). To support mission-
critical use cases, you should deploy a high-availability (HA) cluster configuration with an
external load balancer (Windows | Linux).

An HA installation of Tableau Server has a minimum of three nodes and multiple redundant

instances of key processes (the Repository, File Store/Data Engine, and Coordination Service)
on different nodes. The goal is to minimize system downtime by eliminating single points of
failure and enabling detection of failures with failover where possible. For more information, see
Tableau Server High Availability whitepaper.

Follow the pattern below to build your HA cluster:

1. Install the initial node and allow the architecture-aware smart installer to configure pro-
cesses (Windows | Linux). The active Repository is on Node 1.
2. Replicate the process configuration to other VizQL nodes, ensuring redundancy (Windows
| Linux). The passive Repository is on Node 2. Node 3 processes will mirror Nodes 1 and 2,
except there will be no Repository process on it.
3. Add Coordination Service Ensemble and Client File Service (Windows | Linux).
4. Add the external load balancer (Windows | Linux).

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A 3-Node Tableau Server HA Deployment (Note: Coordination Service and Client File Service
are not explicitly shown)

The need for specialized nodes evolves over time. Extract-heavy and frequent extract refresh
workloads should be isolated from the interactive visualization-rendering workload. In an
extract-heavy environment, most of data sources are extracts. Having a few extremely large
extracts could put your deployment in this category, as would having many small extracts.
Deployments where extracts are frequently refreshed, such as several times a day during
business hours, should be isolated on specialized Backgrounder nodes. To isolate the
workload of the Backgrounder process, add specialized Backgrounder nodes, ensuring
redundancy, as shown in Nodes 4 and 5 below. Using node roles, you can configure where
certain types of workloads are processed on your Tableau Server installation. The node roles
features allows you to dedicate and scale resources to specific workloads. For more
information on configuring node roles for Backgrounder and File Store, see Workload
Management through Node Roles.

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A 5-Node Tableau Server HA Deployment (Note: Coordination Service and Client File Service
are not explicitly shown)

Starting in 2019.3, you can deploy Tableau Server Repository to Amazon Relational Database
Service (RDS). The Tableau Server Repository is a PostgreSQL database that stores data
about all user interactions, extract refreshes, and more. Amazon RDS offers scalability,
reliability, high availability and security built-in for PostgreSQL. By integrating with AWS to
configure Tableau Server external repository, you will be able to take advantage of these
additional benefits of deploying the cloud. For more information, see Tableau Server External
Repository.

When deploying Tableau Server in the public cloud, you have a few options to further mitigate
risk of downtime. For example; deploying each node of Tableau Server in its own Virtual
Network or in different Availability Zones/Zones are both supported. However, separating your
environment could come at the expense of increased latency across the system. Before
finalizing your environment, consider testing both performance and availability to ensure you
have the appropriate balance for your data community. Tableau Server does not support
deploying a multi-node cluster across different Regions.

Disaster Recovery
When planning for disaster recovery (DR) in your Tableau environment, there are two main
factors to consider: Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). The
RTO is a measure of how much downtime your business can accept before a full recovery, and
it influences how often you restore your backups to an alternative cluster and the amount of

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infrastructure investment. The RPO, a measure of how much data loss your business can
tolerate, influences how often you will need to take backups of your system. For Tableau
Server the RPO cannot be shorter than the time it takes to complete a full backup of your
server. The table below illustrates how to plan for a range of RTO requirements:

High RTO Medium RTO Low RTO

New hardware/VMs Machines are Dedicated hardware that is always running

obtained in case of provisioned but not with identical configuration and topology
an outage running as production

Install Tableau Tableau Server Backups are restored regularly to the DR

Server installed environment

Restore backup to Restore latest backup External load balancer/DNS routing that
the new environment to the cold standby can be updated to point to the DR
environment environment

Several hours or A few hours Within minutes

days

Whether you host Tableau Server on premise or in the cloud, the backup process is the same.
Use the TSM Backup command to generate a backup of the Tableau Server and restore that
backup on a new machine. Taking a snapshot of a Tableau Server machine, and restoring on
a new machine is not supported. For more information, see Mission-Critical Reliability for high-
availablity and disaster recovery concepts and whitepapers.

Authentication and Authorization

Tableau Server provides the comprehensive features and deep integration to address all
aspects of enterprise security. For more information, see Tableau Server Platform Security
and Security Hardening Checklist (Windows | Linux).

Identity Store
Tableau Server requires an identity store (Windows | Linux) to manage user and group
information. There are two kinds of identity stores: local (Tableau Server) and external (Active

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Directory, LDAP). When you install Tableau Server you must configure either a local identity
store or an external identity store. For information about configuration options for the identity
store, see identityStore Entity.

When you configure Tableau Server with a local identity store, all user and group information is
stored and managed in the Tableau Server Repository. In the local identity store scenario, there
is no external source for users and groups. Note: Changing the identity store after server
installation requires a full uninstall and reinstall.

When you configure Tableau Server with an external store, all user and group information is
stored and managed by an external directory service. Tableau Server must synchronize with
the external identity store so that local copies of the users and groups exist in the Tableau
Server Repository, but the external identity store is the master source for all user and group
data. When users sign in to Tableau Server, their credentials are passed to the external
directory, which is responsible for authenticating the user (Windows | Linux). Tableau Server
does not perform this authentication; however, the Tableau user names stored in the identity
store are associated with rights and permissions for Tableau Server. After authentication is
verified, Tableau Server manages user access (authorization) for Tableau resources.

Authentication
Authentication verifies a user's identity. Everyone who needs to access Tableau Server—
whether to manage the server, or to publish, browse, or administer content—must be
represented as a user in the Tableau Server identity store. The method of authentication may
be performed by Tableau Server (local authentication), or authentication may be performed by
an external process. In the latter case, you must configure Tableau Server for external
authentication technologies such as Active Directory, OpenLDAP, SAML, or OpenID. In all
cases, whether authentication takes place locally or is external, each user identity must be
represented in the Tableau Server identity store, which is managed by the Repository
(Windows | Linux). The table below shows which authentication methods are compatible with
which identity stores.

Authentication Method Local Authentication AD/LDAP

SAML Yes Yes

Kerberos No Yes

Mutual SSL Yes Yes

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Authentication Method Local Authentication AD/LDAP

OpenID Yes No

Trusted Authentication Yes Yes

Active Directory & OpenLDAP

In this scenario, Tableau Server must be installed in a domain in Active Directory. Tableau
Server will sync user and group metadata from Active Directory to the identity store. You do not
have to manually add users. However, after the data is synchronized, you will need to assign
site and server roles. You can assign these individually, or at the group level. Tableau Server
does not synchronize any data back to Active Directory. Tableau Server manages content and
server access according to the site role permission data is stored in the Repository.

If you are already using Active Directory to manage users in your organization, you must select
Active Directory authentication during Tableau setup. For example, by synchronizing Active
Directory groups, you can set minimum site role Tableau permissions for users that are
synchronized in the groups. You can synchronize specific Active Directory groups, or you can
synchronize them all. For more information, see Synchronize All Active Directory Groups on
the Server. Be sure to review User Management in Active Directory Deployments to
understand how multiple domains, domain naming, NetBIOS, and Active Directory user name
format influence Tableau user management.

You can also configure Tableau Server to use LDAP as a generic way to communicate with the
identity store. For example, OpenLDAP is one of several LDAP server implementations with a
flexible schema. Tableau Server can be configured to query the OpenLDAP server.
See Identity Store. Authentication in this scenario maybe be provided by the native LDAP
solution, or with a single sign-on solution.

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Active Directory/OpenLDAP authentication

SAML
SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) is an XML standard that allows secure web
domains to exchange user authentication and authorization data. You can configure Tableau
Server to use an external identity provider (IdP) to authenticate users over SAML 2.0. Tableau
Server supports both service provider initiated and IdP initiated SAML in browsers only.
Connections from Tableau Desktop or the Tableau Mobile app require that the SAML request
be service provider initiated. No user credentials are stored with Tableau Server, and using
SAML enables you to add Tableau to your organization’s single sign-on environment.

You can use SAML server wide, or you can configure sites individually. Here’s an overview of
those options:

l Server-wide SAML authentication. A single SAML IdP application handles authentication for

all Tableau Server users. Use this option if your server has only the Default site.

In addition, if you want to use site-specific SAML, you must configure server-wide SAML before
you configure individual sites.

l Server-wide local authentication and site-specific SAML authentication. In a multi-site envir-

onment, users who are not enabled for SAML authentication at the site level can sign in
using local authentication.

l Server-wide SAML authentication and site-specific SAML authentication. In a multi-site

environment, all users authenticate through a SAML IdP configured at the site level, and
you specify a server-wide default SAML IdP for users that belong to multiple sites.

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User authentication through SAML does not apply to permissions and authorization
for Tableau Server content, such as data sources and workbooks. It also does not control
access to underlying data that workbooks and data sources connect to. For more information,
see SAML (Windows | Linux).

SAML Authentication

Trusted Tickets
If you embed Tableau Server views into webpages, everyone who visits the page must be a
licensed user on Tableau Server. When users visit the page, they are prompted to sign in to
Tableau Server before they can see the view. If you already have a way of authenticating users
on the webpage or within your web application, you can avoid this prompt and save your users
from having to sign in twice by setting up trusted authentication.

Trusted authentication simply means that you have set up a trusted relationship between
Tableau Server and one or more web servers. When Tableau Server receives requests from
these trusted web servers it assumes that your web server has handled whatever
authentication is necessary.

If your web server uses SSPI (Security Support Provider Interface), you do not need to set up
trusted authentication. You can embed views and your users will have secure access to them
as long as they are licensed Tableau Server users and members of your Active Directory
(Windows | Linux).

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Trusted Tickets

Mutual SSL
Using mutual SSL, you can provide users of Tableau Desktop and other approved Tableau
clients a secure, direct-access experience to Tableau Server. With mutual SSL, when a client
with a valid SSL certificate connects to Tableau Server, Tableau Server confirms the existence
of the client certificate and authenticates the user, based on the user name in the client
certificate. If the client does not have a valid SSL certificate, Tableau Server can refuse the
connection. You can also configure Tableau Server to fall back to username/password
authentication if mutual SSL fails.

Authorization
Authorization refers to how and what users can access on Tableau Server after authentication
has been verified. For more information, see Governance in Tableau on page 34.
Authorization includes:

l What users are allowed to do with content hosted on Tableau Server, including projects,
sites, workbooks, and views.
l What users are allowed to do with the data sources that are managed by Tableau Server.
l What tasks users are allowed to perform to administer Tableau Server, such as configuring
server settings, running command line tools, creating sites, and other tasks.

Authorization is managed by Tableau Server and determined by a combination of the user's

license level (Tableau Creator, Tableau Explorer, Tableau Viewer), site role, and permissions
associated with specific entities such as workbooks and data sources. The project team should

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work together to define the permissions model. Tableau Server and/or Site Administrators will
assign permission rules to groups, and lock them to the project. Custom permissions allow
more granularity in permissions—from accessing or downloading a data source to how a user
interacts with published content.

Tableau’s intuitive interface makes it easy to associate users to functional groups, assign
permissions to the groups, and see who has access to which content. You can create groups
locally on the server or import from Active Directory and synchronize on a set schedule. The
permissions view also helps business users manage their own users and groups. For more
information, see Set-up Permissions Quick Start, Configure Projects, Groups, and
Permissions for Managed Self-Service, and Permissions Reference.

Network Communication
There are three main network interfaces in Tableau Server:

l Client to Tableau Server: The client can be a web browser, Tableau Mobile, Tableau
Desktop, Tableau Prep Builder, or the tsm (Windows | Linux) and tabcmd (Windows |
Linux) utilities.
l Tableau Server to your database(s): To refresh data extracts or handle live database con-
nections, Tableau Server needs to communicate with your database(s).
l Server component communication: This applies to distributed deployments only.

You should configure SSL to ensure that access to Tableau Server is secure and that sensitive
information passed between the server and Tableau clients is protected on your network. For
more information, visit Network Security (Windows | Linux) and Ports (Windows | Linux).

Network Topologies
Users will be accessing Tableau from all over the place: their offices, on the road from their
phones, from client sites in another country, and more. To ensure the Server is reachable no
matter where the client is coming in from, you must determine the right network topology.
Common network configurations are shown below:

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On-Premises with External VPN Access

On-Premises with External VPN Access

On-Premises with Reverse Proxy

On-Premises with Reverse Proxy

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Public Cloud Deployment

Public Cloud Deployment

Data Strategy
Every organization has different requirements and solutions for its data infrastructure. Tableau
respects an organization’s choice and integrates with your existing data strategy. In addition to
the enterprise data warehouse, there are many new sources of data appearing inside and
outside of your organization: cloud applications and data, big data databases, structured and
unstructured Repositories. From Hadoop clusters to NoSQL databases, and many others, the
data flow no longer needs to be centralized around the enterprise data warehouse (EDW) as a
final destination.

Modern data architecture is driven by new business requirements (speed, agility, volume) and
new technology. You choose whether to provide access to the data in place or enrich data with
other sources. Combine this with cloud solutions that allow for infrastructure and services to
spin up data pipelines in hours, and what you have is a process for moving data around an
organization like never before. Unfortunately, the new opportunity is largely missed if your
organization’s data management handbook was written using a traditional EDW’s single
bucket of data mindset. The trick to shifting from buckets to pipelines is accepting that not all
data questions within an organization can be answered from any one data source. The pattern
for a modern data architecture is shown below.

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Modern Data Architecture

1. Raw Data: sources of data, for example, transactional data that is loaded into the data plat-
form that often needs transforming in several ways: cleansing, inspection for PII, etc.
2. Compute for Prep: the processing of the raw data can require significant computational
resources, so it's more than traditional ETL. Often Data Science apps will sit here. They
actually can create new data with high value.
3. Storage: Modern data platforms are built on a principle of storing data because you never
know how it might be used in the future. Increasingly, we store intermediate data and mul-
tiple versions and forms of the same data. Storage is therefore layered.
4. Compute for Query: the typical analytic database engine, including Hyper extracts, but also
Hadoop, etc.
5. Analytics: Tableau sits in Analytics.

Tableau’s Hybrid Data Architecture

Tableau’s hybrid data architecture provides two modes for interacting with data, using a live
connection or an in-memory extract. Switching between the two is as easy as selecting the right
option for your use case.

Live Connection
Tableau’s data connectors leverage your existing data infrastructure by sending dynamic
queries directly to the source database rather than importing all the data. This means that if
you’ve invested in fast, analytics-optimized databases, you can gain the benefits of that
investment by connecting live to your data. This leaves the detail data in the source system and
sends the aggregate results of queries to Tableau. Additionally, this means that Tableau can

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effectively utilize unlimited amounts of data. In fact, Tableau is the front-end analytics client to
many of the largest databases in the world. Tableau has optimized each connector to take
advantage of the unique characteristics of each data source.

In-Memory Extract
If you have a data architecture built on transactional databases or want to reduce the workload
of the core data infrastructure, Tableau’s Data Engine powered by Hyper technology provides
an in-memory data store that is optimized for analytics. You can connect and extract your data
to bring it in-memory to perform queries in Tableau with one click. Using Tableau Data Extracts
can greatly improve the user experience by reducing the time it takes to re-query the
database. In turn, extracts free up the database server from redundant query traffic.

Extracts are a great solution for highly-active transactional systems that cannot afford the
resources for frequent queries. The extract can be refreshed nightly and available to users
during the day. Extracts can also be subsets of data based on a fixed number of records, a
percentage of total records, or filtered criteria. The Data Engine can even do incremental
extracts that update existing extracts with new data. Extracts are not intended to replace your
database, so right-size the extract to the analysis at hand.

If you need to share your workbooks with users who do not have direct access to the
underlying data sources, you can leverage Extracts.  Tableau’s packaged workbooks (.twbx
file type) contain all the analysis and data that was used for the workbook; making it both
portable and shareable with other Tableau users.

If a user publishes a workbook using an extract, that extract is also published to the server.
Future interaction with the workbook will use the extract instead of requesting live data. If
enabled, the workbook can be set to request an automatic refresh of the extract on a schedule.

Query Federation
When related data is stored in tables across different databases or files, you can use a cross-
database join to combine the tables. To create a cross-database join, you create a multi-
connection Tableau data source by adding and then connecting to each of the different
databases (including Excel and text files) before you join the tables. Cross-database joins can
be used with live connections or in-memory extracts.

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Data Server
Included with Tableau Server, Data Server provides sharing and centralized management of
extracts and shared proxy database connections, allowing IT to make governed, measured and
managed data sources available to all users of Tableau Server without duplicating extracts or
data connections across workbooks.

Because multiple workbooks can connect to one data source, you can minimize the proliferation
of embedded data sources and save on storage space and processing time. When someone
downloads a workbook that connects to a Published Data Source that in turn has an extract
connection, the extract stays on the server, reducing network traffic. Finally, if a connection
requires a database driver, you need to install and maintain the driver only on the server,
instead of on each user’s computer. 

Using the initial data use cases collected from each team, a DBA and/or Data Steward will
publish a certified data source for each source of data identified for users with the appropriate
permissions to access it. Users can connect directly to a Published Data Source from Tableau
Desktop and Tableau Server.

Published Data Sources prevent the proliferation of data silos and untrusted data for both
extract and live connections. Extract refreshes can be scheduled, and users across the
organization will stay up to date with the same shared data and definitions. A Published Data
Source can be configured to connect directly to live data with a proxy database connection. This
means your organization has a way to centrally manage data connections, join logic, meta data
and calculated fields

At the same time, to enable self-service and flexibility, users can extend the data model by
blending in new data or creating new calculations and allow the newly defined data model to be
delivered to production in an agile manner. The centrally managed data will not change, but
users retain flexibility.

Certified Data Sources

Database administrators and/or Data Stewards should certify Published Data Sources to
indicate to users that the data is trusted. Certified data sources appear with a unique
certification badge in both Tableau Server and Tableau Desktop. Certification notes allow you
to describe why a particular data source can be trusted. These notes are accessible throughout
Tableau when viewing this data source as well as who certified it. Certified data sources receive
preferential treatment in search results and stand out in data source lists in Tableau Server and

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Tableau Desktop. Project leaders, site admins, and Tableau Server administrators have
permission to certify data sources. For more information, visit Certified Data Sources.

Data Security
Data security is of utmost importance in every enterprise. Tableau allows customers to build
upon their existing data security implementations. IT administrators have the flexibility to
implement security within the database with database authentication, within Tableau with
permissions, or a hybrid approach of both. Security will be enforced regardless of whether
users are accessing the data from published views on the web, on mobile devices, or through
Tableau Desktop and Tableau Prep Builder. Customers often favor the hybrid approach for its
flexibility to handle different kinds of use cases. Start by establishing a data security
classification to define the different types of data and levels of sensitivity that exist in your
organization.

When leveraging database security, it is important to note that the method chosen for
authentication to the database is key. This level of authentication is separate from the Tableau
Server authentication (i.e. when a user logs into Tableau Server, he or she is not yet logging
into the database). This means that Tableau Server users will also need to have credentials
(their own username/password or service account username/password) to connect to the
database for the database-level security to apply. To further protect your data, Tableau only
needs read-access credentials to the database, which prevents publishers from accidentally
changing the underlying data. Alternatively, in some cases, it is useful to give the database
user permission to create temporary tables. This can have both performance and security
advantages because the temporary data is stored in the database rather than in Tableau.

Extract encryption at rest is a data security feature that allows you to encrypt .hyper extracts
while they are stored on Tableau Server. Tableau Server administrators can enforce
encryption of all extracts on their site or allow users to specify to encrypt all extracts associated
with particular published workbooks or data sources. For more information, see Extract
Encryption at Rest. If your organization is deploying Data Extract Encryption at Rest, then you
may optionally configure Tableau Server to use AWS as the KMS for extract encryption. To
enable AWS KMS, you must deploy Tableau Server in AWS EC2. In the AWS scenario,
Tableau Server uses the AWS KMS customer master key (CMK) to generate an AWS data key.
Tableau Server uses the AWS data key as the root master key for all encrypted extracts.
However, even when configured for AWS KMS, the native Java keystore and local KMS are still
used for secure storage of secrets on Tableau Server. The AWS KMS is only used to encrypt

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the root master key for encrypted extracts. For more information, see Key Management
System.

You can limit which users see what data by setting user filters on data sources. This allows you
to better control what data users see in a published view based on their Tableau Server login
account. Using this technique, a regional manager is able to view data for her region but not the
data for the other regional managers. With these data security approaches, you can publish a
single view or dashboard in a way that provides secure, personalized data and analysis to a
wide range of users on Tableau Server. For more information, see Data Security and Restrict
Access at the Data Row Level.

Tableau Server Add-ons

Tableau Data Management Add-on

The Tableau Data Management Add-on helps you better manage the data within your analytics
environment, ensuring that trusted and up-to-date data is always used to drive decisions. From
data preparation to cataloging, search and governance, the Data Management Add-on will
increase trust in your data, accelerating the adoption of self-service analytics. It is a separately
licensed collection of features and functionality including Tableau Prep Conductor and Tableau
Catalog, which manage Tableau content and data assets.

Tableau Prep Conductor is included in the Data Management Add-on as of Tableau Server
2019.1. Tableau Prep Conductor runs flows, checks connection credentials, and sends alerts if
a flow fails. Tableau Prep Conductor leverages the scheduling and tracking functionality of
Tableau Server so you can automate running flows to update the flow output instead of logging
into Tableau Prep Builder to manually run individual flows as your data changes. It is
recommended that you enable Tableau Prep Conductor on a dedicated node to run flows. For
new Tableau Server installations, see Installing Tableau Server with Prep Conductor. To
enable Tableau Prep Conductor on an existing installation of Tableau Server, see Enable
Tableau Prep Conductor to your Tableau Server Installation.

Starting in 2019.3, Tableau Catalog is also included in the Data Management Add-on to
Tableau Server. Tableau Catalog integrates with Tableau applications to provide lineage,
impact analysis, data dictionary, data quality warnings, and enhanced search by indexing all
content, including workbooks, data sources, sheets, and flows. To enable Tableau Catalog on
Tableau Server, see Enable Tableau Catalog.

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Tableau Server Management Add-on

Tableau Server Management Add-on is a separately licensed Add-on to Tableau Server which
will provide enhanced security, manageability, and scalability capabilities for Tableau Server.
To learn more about what is included, as well as specific installation and configuration
requirements for each, see the following topics:

l Resource Monitoring Tool

l Content Migration Tool
l Key Management System
l Tableau Server External Repository
l Workload Management through Node Roles

Analytics Extensions
Tableau supports a set of functions that you can use to pass expressions to external services
for integration with R, MATLAB, and Python. Combining advanced statistical analytics with
Tableau gives you the ability to enable users of all skill levels to reap the benefits without deep
knowledge of the underlying statistical packages and functions. Additional configuration in
Tableau Server is needed to enable external advanced analytics functionality.

Extensibility
Tableau supports a robust extensibility framework for deep and complex enterprise
integrations and embedded analytics solutions. Extensibility spans from administrative task
automation to rich visualization integration to enterprise portal applications, bringing any data
from any source into a Tableau supported format and delivering server automation with a
growing set of standards-based APIs. For more information, see IT Tools and Tableau
Developer Program.

REST API
With the Tableau Server REST API you can create, read, update, delete and manage Tableau
Server entities programmatically, via HTTP. The API gives you simple access to the
functionality behind the data sources, projects, workbooks, site users, and sites on a Tableau
Server. You can use this access to create your own custom applications or to script
interactions with Tableau Server resources.

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Extract API
Tableau provides direct support and connection to a large number of data sources; however,
there are times when you may want to pre-process or access and assemble data from other
applications before working with it in Tableau. With Tableau’s Extract API, developers can write
their own programs to access and process those data sources into a Tableau Data Extract. Use
Extract API 2.0 for .hyper format and Tableau SDK for .tde format. The extract can be used
natively in Tableau Desktop or published to Tableau Server using the same API. Once the
extract has been published to Tableau Server, it is available for an individual to use with the web
authoring capability or in Tableau Desktop. The API works with C/C++, Java, and Python. The
Extract API is available for developers on Windows and Linux platforms.

Hyper API
The Tableau Hyper API contains a set of functions you can use to automate your interactions
with Tableau extract (.hyper) files for Tableau 10.5 and later, including the following:

l Create extract files for data sources not currently supported by Tableau.
l Automate custom extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes (for example, implement
rolling window updates or custom incremental updates).
l Retrieve data from an extract file.

In addition to supporting all features of the previous Extract API 2.0 for creating extract files, the
Hyper API provides access to new features. You can create, read, update, and delete (CRUD)
data in .hyper files while leveraging the full speed of Hyper for creating and updating extract
files. You can load data directly from CSV files without having to write special code. With the
power of SQL to interact with data in .hyper files, the API provides methods for executing
arbitrary SQL commands on .hyper files.

Web Data Connector

You can use the Tableau Web Data Connector SDK to build connectors to additional data
sources with Javascript and HTML. Web data connectors (WDCs) are web pages that provide a
data connection that is accessible over HTTP for data sources that don't already have a
connector in Tableau. WDCs allow users to connect to almost any data that is accessible over
the web and to create extracts for their workbooks. Data sources for a WDC can include internal
web services, JSON data, REST APIs, and other sources that are available over HTTP or
HTTPS. Users can create their own WDC or use connectors that were created by others. To

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publish to Tableau Server, WDCs will need to be whitelisted (Windows | Linux). For more
information on community connectors, see Web Data Connector Forum.

JavaScript API
With Tableau’s JavaScript API, you can fully integrate Tableau visualizations into your own
web applications. The API uses an event-based architecture, providing you with flexibility for
round-trip control of users’ actions in Tableau visualizations and control of your users’
interactions. For example, your enterprise may have a web portal that bridges several lines of
business applications as well as dashboards. To make it easier for users, you may prefer to
have a consistent UI across all applications. With the JavaScript API, you can create buttons
and other controls in your preferred style that control elements of a Tableau dashboard.

Extensions API
With Tableau’s Extensions API, developers can create dashboard extensions that enable
customers to integrate and interact with data from other applications directly from a Tableau
dashboard, such as write-back functionality, custom interactive interfaces, and third-party
product integration. Dashboard extensions run in custom dashboard zones and can interact
with the rest of the dashboard using the Tableau Extensions API. Available third-party
extensions have been published in the Extension Gallery. To publish to Tableau Server,
extensions will need to be whitelisted (Windows | Linux). Administrators can enable on a per-
server or per-site basis based on code review and security assessment.

Document API
The Document API provides a supported path for modifying Tableau workbook and data
source XML. Using Python, you can create a template workbook in Tableau and easily deploy
it across multiple servers, update data sources and connections, and evaluate fields within a
data source.

TSM API
Tableau Server includes a set of administrative services called Tableau Services Manager
(TSM). This set of documentation describes the prerelease TSM API (0.5 alpha), which you
can use to perform a wide range of tasks, including start and stop Tableau Server, view the

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status of services and nodes, backup and restore Tableau Server, make configuration and
topology changes, change port assignments for services, and create log file archives.

Metadata API
Tables, data sources, workbooks, and sheets are available to query via the Tableau Metadata
API. The API is fast and flexible and includes common attributes like name, hostname, and URI,
as well as type specific information like field data types, and certification. The API will also allow
you to query for connected items (e.g. tables and columns used by a specific data source). In
addition to the Metadata API, metadata methods are available in the Tableau REST API, which
can be found in Metadata Methods topic.

Mobile App Bootstrap

Develop custom mobile apps with the Mobile App Bootstrap (MAB). The MAB is a sample open-
source mobile app that demonstrates how to connect and stay signed in to Tableau Servers,
embed Tableau content, and utilize the Tableau JavaScript API to embed the Tableau content
you want to have right at your fingertips. For more information, visit Mobile App Bootstrap –
React Native, Mobile App Bootstrap – Cordova or Mobile App Bootstrap – Objective-C.

Tableau License Types

Now more than ever, people need access to data to do their jobs better, but their relationship to
data can differ. Tableau’s role-based licenses allow you to deploy data broadly across your
organization to users of all skill levels. These roles will allow you to share data with your teams in
a secure way, while allowing for the differences in the way people interact with data.

License types are hierarchical. With appropriate permissions, Creators can access the full
functionality of Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server/Online, and Tableau Prep Builder. Explorers
have access to a subset of these capabilities via Tableau Server/Online, and Viewers receive a
limited set of Tableau Server permissions based on the needs of someone who views and
interacts only.

Tableau Creator
The Creator license is designed for users who build content. This can include the design,
cleaning, and curation of data sources, which others will use to analyze governed data, or the

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creation of visualizations and dashboards with which other users will interact. It also includes
designing governance and permissions models that dictate which information users may find.

You might be a Creator if…

l Analytics is in your everyday job description.

l You need to join many data sources together to perform analysis.
l You build or curate data sources for others.
l You need to clean and transform data in addition to analyzing it.
l You will manage or administer a Tableau Server or Online implementation.

Tableau Explorer
The Explorer option provides governed authoring and data exploration capabilities for users
who do not need the full data transformation capabilities of Tableau Prep Builder, or the ability
to publish or connect to raw data sources. Explorers may access and analyze published data,
create and distribute their own dashboards, and manage content that they have built or have
been given the permission to edit.

You might be an Explorer if…

l You are a Line of Business data user who likes to get hands-on with data.
l You need to create your own visualizations using data sources curated by others.
l You want to take visualizations and dashboards built by others and edit or customize
them.
l You will administer content on a Tableau Server or Online site.

Tableau Viewer
Tableau Viewers can view and interact with published visualizations and dashboards. These
users can be given permission to access published content and interact with guided drill paths
and filters. They can also subscribe to dashboards to get periodic updates and receive data-
driven alerts.

You might be a Viewer if…

l You need data-oriented insights to do your job, but you don’t have time or skills to do
deep analytics yourself.
l You want to interact with visuals others have built, but not build your own.

Depending on the level of interest within different business groups in your organization, your
allocation of Creator, Explorer, and Viewer license types will vary. However, a typical Tableau

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deployment will need to assure that users with certain responsibilities receive the appropriate
license type and corresponding education.

Client Software
Administrators will distribute and install Tableau Desktop and Tableau Prep Builder for Creator-
licensed users. If you choose to create a packaged installation file, you can customize the install
and not have any prompts for the end user during the install process. When you install Tableau
Desktop or Tableau Prep Builder on a Windows or Mac computer, default database connectivity
drivers are installed. For a complete list of default drivers, see Before You Install. If you prefer
that some or all of these drivers not be installed, you can customize the list from the Customize
pane in the installation program for Tableau Desktop. If additional drivers are needed beyond
the default, they will need to be installed on each computer.

Virtual desktop support is an “opt-in” feature of Tableau Desktop 10.5 and later and Tableau
Prep Builder 2018.2.1 and later that gives you the ability to optimize your installations of
Tableau for non-persistent virtual desktops or for computers that are regularly re-imaged. With
virtual desktop support enabled, Tableau licenses are automatically deactivated after a
predetermined amount of time if Tableau Desktop or Tableau Prep Builder cannot connect to a
Tableau-hosted service that confirms the validity of the license. This means that you do not
need to manually refresh or deactivate the product key. The requirement that Tableau
communicate with the hosted service means that you must periodically connect to the Internet.
For more information, see Configure Virtual Desktop Support.

It is recommended to enable a feature where Tableau Desktop licenses log end user
information within your Tableau Server Repository. Each copy of Tableau Desktop version 10.0
or later can be configured to send user data to Tableau Server. This configuration should be
done at installation time, using scripting or third-party software to install and configure Tableau,
or after installation, by modifying the registry or property list file. For more information,
see Configure Desktop License Reporting and continue the server-configuration as outlined in
the License Tracking section.

To manage Tableau mobile deployments, we recommend using mobile device management

(MDM) or mobile application management (MAM). The following are supported mobile
management systems: Blackberry Dynamics, VMware Workspace ONE, MobileIron, Citrix
XenMobile, and Microsoft Intune. Users will see touch-optimized views on Apple iPad and
iPhone, Android phone and tablet, as well as mobile browsers. For more information, visit
Tableau Mobile Deployment Guide.

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Tableau Support Programs

Tableau Software offers three support levels to help meet the service needs of all customers.

l Standard Support is included with a subscription purchase, the first year of a perpetual
license or with Annual Maintenance Renewal after the first year of a perpetual license.
l Extended Support enables your organization to avoid or reduce downtime and expedite
the value of your investment through accelerated response times and the additional avail-
ability of 24 x 7 weekend support for critical P1 issues.
l Premium Support provides complete, proactive account care you can rely on. Premium
Support provides a comprehensive set of resources, extended availability and the fastest
response time to service issues with 24 x 7 support for P1 and P2 issues.

For more information, see Technical Support program levels.

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Tableau Monitoring
Ongoing, proactive monitoring is required to operate and support your deployment at scale and
meet the performance expectations of your user community. As more and more users are
onboarded and the use of analytics grows across your organization, Tableau becomes mission-
critical for data-driven decisions. Without monitoring, a “set-it-and-forget-it” deployment can be
met with inadequate resources that fail to support the workload of highly-engaged users.

Because Tableau is integrated with your enterprise architecture—including hardware, network,

databases, and applications—understanding how everything interoperates is key for routine
monitoring from performance to troubleshooting. Licensed as part of the Tableau Server
Management Add-on, Resource Monitoring Tool , using agent-based monitoring, offers
enhanced insights into the health and performance of a Tableau Server cluster by parsing and
analyzing the logs generated by overall Server usage and combining that with monitoring of
physical system usage (CPU Usage, RAM, Disk I/O etc.). Alternatively, you can use a
combination of hardware utilization monitoring, data from Tableau Server’s Repository, and
external tools to understand and monitor the health of Tableau Server and how analytics are
being consumed. You can use standard enterprise monitoring platforms, such as Splunk, New
Relic, or other agent-based utilities, as well as Tableau Desktop to analyze your Tableau Server
data.

Tableau Server and Site Administrators will work together to ensure performance and stability
of the platform to meet evolving business needs. It is just as important to monitor for things that
go right as it is for things that go wrong. With viral adoption of Tableau in your organization, you
will need to be responsive to the increased workloads and proactively scale to avoid resource
constraints. On the other hand, assuming a correctly-sized hardware configuration is deployed
initially, unmonitored hardware utilization and user workloads, inefficient workbooks,
suboptimal data extract design, and peak-hour data refresh schedules can have a major impact
on server performance and user experience, causing performance to degrade from the
cumulative effect of the separate incidents.

This document defines the required tasks for Tableau Server monitoring and operations that
should be performed by systems administrators and Tableau Server Administrators:

l Set up tools to monitor hardware utilization and maintain sufficient headroom for future
growth and peak usage spikes.
l Configure built-in alerts and incidents to notify you of events and thresholds.

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l Use default administrative views to identify background task success/failure and job
queueing, slow workbooks, disk usage, and license allocations.
l Create custom administrative views from repository data for deeper analytics on your
deployment and set custom data-driven alerts for your own organization's policies and
goals.
l Troubleshoot problems with Tableau Server logs.

Administrative Roles and Responsibilities

Depending on the size of the organization and deployment, monitoring and measurement
responsibilities may be split across different teams. For example, a systems administrator may
be responsible for the hardware and operating system only, while Tableau Server
Administrators will monitor and track key application metrics and Site Administrators will
measure content metrics in their respective site(s). Both are equally important for overall
success.

If there are no Site Administrators, content metrics should be monitored and measured by the
Server Administrator. For more information on content metrics, see Measurement of
Tableau User Engagement and Adoption on page 135. Regardless of the deployment
size, system performance is a shared responsibility among administrators and users. 

Hardware Monitoring
Any application is only as reliable and performant as the hardware that it runs on. It is important
that the underlying infrastructure of your Tableau Server deployment be routinely monitored
for capacity constraints to prevent overtaxing the system, whether it’s physical servers or
virtual machines, on-premises or in the cloud. Systems administrators should monitor CPU,
memory usage, storage I/O, storage space, and network bandwidth utilization.

Beginning with 2019.3 and licensed as part of the Tableau Server Management Add-on, the
Resource Monitoring Tool provides a comprehensive look at the health of Tableau Server
using a web user interface for all of its features. The Resource Monitoring Tool Agent runs on
each of the nodes in your Tableau cluster to monitor their hardware utilization, performance,
and activity, which are collated by the Resource Monitoring Tool Master Server. Processor,
Memory, Disk Queue, and Network are sampled using WMI several times per second to
produce averages. An Environment Down event, which is logged as critical, is monitored at a
15 second polling interval by default and follows a three-strike rule. If the status is offline, or

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does not reply within 30 seconds, for three consecutive polling intervals then a critical incident is
created. For more information, see Performance and Environment Down.

BEST PRACTICE RECOMMENDATION:

To maintain sufficient headroom and reduce the likelihood of resource constraints, calculate the
following values based on your hardware specs and set Resource Monitoring Tool Hardware
incident thresholds to the following:

l CPU over 80% for 5 minutes

l Memory less than 25% available
l Disk less than 20% available

Depending on your enterprise monitoring approach, hardware monitoring can be done with an
agent-based enterprise monitoring service or with PerfMon on Windows (sample workbook).
Linux admins will use the sysstat tools or vmstat to collect data to be analyzed in a workbook
similar to the Windows version. When deploying on virtual platforms, such as VMware, HyperV,
or Citrix, or in the public cloud, including AWS (CloudWatch), Microsoft Azure (Azure Portal),
and Google Cloud Platform (Google Stackdriver), these platforms have their own utilities for
monitoring the health of their virtual machines. These tools usually have support for
automatically monitoring your infrastructure and alerting you when your preset thresholds of
75-85% utilization are exceeded.

Alternatively, TabMon is a freely available open source Tableau Server cluster-monitoring tool.
TabMon provides structured output that is analyzed with Tableau Desktop. For more
information, watch A Tour of the TabMon Sample Workbook that shows how to monitor CPU,
memory usage, storage I/O, storage space, and network bandwidth at the Tableau Server
Process level. This information will help you understand when to scale Tableau Server. In the
TabMon.config file, you should monitor every 300 seconds and keep data for 30-day intervals
to manage the size of the database.

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Built-in Alerts
If Tableau Server processes go down, the application state will be degraded or even fail
depending on the process that goes down. During installation and configuration, Tableau
Server was configured with an SMTP email server to notify the specified email distribution list
about system alerts and failures. With system alerts enabled, you will be notified by email of
process up, down, and failover events and drive space constraints. See below for
recommended settings.

BEST PRACTICE RECOMMENDATION:

Enable system health monitoring in Tableau Services Manager for process up, down and
failover events, license reporting, and disk space. Use an email distribution group of
administrators rather than an individual’s email address for notifications. If you are using the
Resource Monitoring Tool, keep thresholds synchronized.

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Resource Monitoring Tool Incidents

Beginning with 2019.3 and licensed as part of the Tableau Server Management Add-on, the
Resource Monitoring Tool provides a comprehensive look at the health of Tableau Server using
a web user interface for all of its features. The Resource Monitoring Tools Agent runs on each
of the nodes in your Tableau cluster to monitor their performance and activity, which are
collated by the Resource Monitoring Tool Master Server.

Incidents should be configured and used to help detect when unusual situations occur, which
include a variety of events for both Tableau Server and the server it is running on. Global
incidents can be configured, but they may be overridden per environment. There are three
levels of incidents: Info, Warning, and Critical. For more information, see Tableau Resource
Monitoring Tool - Incidents.

In addition to Hardware and Environment Down that are described in Hardware Monitoring,
incidents will be logged for the following reasons:

l Extract Failures - logged as a warning when there is an extract failure in Tableau.

l Slow Queries - logged if a query exceeds threshold. By default, a Slow Query incident will
trigger a warning if any data query takes at least 30 seconds to execute.
l Slow View - logged if view request exceeds threshold. By default, a Slow View incident
will trigger a warning if any view request takes at least 1 minute to load.
l Agents Unlicensed - logged as critical if Tableau Server has not been properly licensed
to use Tableau Resource Monitoring Tool.

Tableau Server Process Status

When Tableau Server is functioning properly, most processes will show as Active, Busy or
Passive (Repository). The list below shows possible process states:

l Active — The process is functioning as intended. See File Store in Troubleshoot Server Pro-
cesses for details on possible active states.

l Busy — The process is completing some task. See File Store and Repository
in Troubleshoot Server Processes for more information.

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l Passive — The repository is in passive mode.

l Unlicensed — The process is unlicensed.

l Down — The process is down. The implications of this differ depending on the process.

l Status unavailable — Tableau Server is unable to determine the status of the process.

To find the status of processes, go to the Tableau Server Status page or Tableau Services
Manager status page. These pages include Tableau Server processes, along with links to
troubleshooting documentation if a process is not running as expected. If you hover your
mouse pointer over the status indicator for a process, a tooltip shows the node name and the
port the process is running on.

Beginning with 2019.3 and licensed as part of the Tableau Server Management Add-on, the
Resource Monitoring Tool provides a comprehensive look at the health of Tableau Server
using a web user interface for all of its features, including process status. The Resource
Monitoring Tool polls Tableau Server’s http://{TableauServerUrl}/admin/systeminfo.xml page
every 15 seconds (by default) to check the status. If the status is offline, or does not reply within
30 seconds, for three consecutive polling intervals then a critical incident is created. For more
information, Environment Down.

To integrate with external enterprise monitoring tools, use the TSM REST API to get the status
of each process.

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BEST PRACTICE RECOMMENDATION:

In case of an error, review Troubleshoot Server Processes in Online Help and take a log
snapshot if you need to contact Tableau Support for further assistance.

Administrative Views
Data from the Tableau Server repository will be analyzed using default administrative views and
custom administrative views. Administrative views are dashboards that are included with
Tableau Server and help you understand how users are interacting with content so that you can
proactively monitor server activity and other scheduled tasks. Server Administrators can view
administrative views for all server activity; Site Administrators have access to Tableau Server’s
default administrative views limited to their respective site.

BEST PRACTICE RECOMMENDATION:

Regularly spend time understanding the Tableau Server usage patterns and how the
application is performing throughout the day. Keep a close watch on background tasks, such as
extract refreshes and subscriptions, to make sure they are executing on time and during off-
peak hours as much as possible. Isolating the Backgrounder processes to their own node is
recommended for heavy extract workloads.

Brief descriptions of the default administrative views that are most applicable to Server
Administrators are shown below:

l Background Tasks for Extracts — Completed, pending, and failed extract task details with
full details of why an error occurred.
l Background Tasks for Non Extracts — Completed, pending, and failed non-extract back-
ground task details with full details on why an error occurred.
l Background Task Delays — Difference between scheduled and actual start times of back-
ground tasks. Use the view to help you identify places you can improve server performance
by redistributing task schedules and optimizing tasks. Background Task delays are an
important metric to determine whether you should isolate Backgrounder processes and
scale out to add additional capacity for data refreshes.
l Stats for Load Times — View load times and performance history. Set data-driven alerts on
long view load times using the version of the default admin views workbook you down-
loaded and published with extracted data sources. For workbooks with long-load times, use

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Tableau Desktop’s or Tableau Server’s Performance Recorder to dive deeper into the
events and timing.
l Stats for Space Usage — Space used by published workbooks and data sources, includ-
ing extracts and live connections. Set data-driven alerts on the Stats for Space Usage view
to identify which workbooks and data sources exceed the expected size limit. For example,
if you set a standard that extract sizes should be less than 1 GB, then alert for anything lar-
ger.
l Performance of Views — Overall distribution of view load times and slowest views in a
given time period. Compare spikes in the number of sessions with spikes in slow load times
to identify the times of day when high user traffic is slowing down the server.
l Performance of Flow Runs – view to see the performance history for all the flows on a site
l Server Disk Space — Current and historical disk space usage, by server node. Use the
Server Disk Space view to see how much disk space is in use on the server(s) that run
Tableau Server, where disk space refers only to the partition where Tableau Server is
installed. You can also use this view to identify sudden changes in disk space usage.
l Tableau Desktop License Usage — Summary of usage for Tableau Desktop licenses.
Manage licenses efficiently and determine if you need more or fewer licenses.
l Tableau Desktop License Expirations — Expiration information for Tableau Desktop
licenses.

The following default administrative views will be monitored primarily by Site Administrators,
which are covered in Measurement of Tableau User Engagement and Adoption on
page 135

l Traffic to Views — Usage and users for published views.

l Traffic to Data Sources — Usage and users for Published Data Sources.
l Actions by All Users — Actions for all users.
l Actions by Specific User — Actions for a specific user, including items used.
l Actions by Recent Users — Recent actions by users, including last action time and idle
time.

Custom administrative views are useful for deeper analysis of user behaviors and
organization-specific KPIs that are identified. For example, if you define stale content as
workbooks that have not been accessed in the last 90 days, you should create a custom
administrative view showing the content that has not been accessed in the last 90 days. If

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these workbooks have data extract refresh schedules, they are consuming system resources
but not providing value to your users.

BEST PRACTICE RECOMMENDATION:

You should publish and extract the default administrative views workbook to make it accessible
to Site Administrators. After opening the administrative views in Tableau Server, you can copy
the temp workbook to your computer, open in Tableau Desktop, and publish to Tableau Server
for others to view. In Tableau Server 10.x to 2018.1, the location is “Tableau
Server\data\tabsvc\temp”. In 2018.2 and later, it can be under any vizql server process. For
example: Tableau Server\data\tabsvc\temp\vizqlserver_1.20182.18.0627.2230.

In the published admin views workbook, create data-driven alerts for Stats for Load Times and
Stats for Space Usage according to your governing standards. For example, if you have a < 10
second load time standard, the data-driven alert will notify you of load times > 10 seconds.
Similarly, if you have a 1GB standard for workbook or data source size, the data-driven alert will
notify you of workbooks or data sources > 1GB.

For custom administrative views, you should use the default administrative views workbook as a
starting point for customizations of existing dashboards and published/extracted community
data sources to perform deeper analysis on your deployment. A full listing of the repository’s
data dictionary is published in Online Help.

Both the default administrative views workbook and the community data sources have curated
data models that can be connected to your own Tableau Server. Each of the community data
sources contain the corresponding fields for their functional area with comments, and they’re
organized into folders. Sample workbooks are also provided in the community post. The list of
recommended published data sources is shown below:

l TS Background Tasks — Primarily for analyzing Extract Refresh and Subscription tasks that
are run on Backgrounder processes.
l TS Events — A master audit data source showing events happening on Tableau Server.
Users signing in, accessing views, publishing content, etc.
l TS Web Requests — An audit of requests made through the Tableau Server web server
component. Useful for understanding user interaction with content, as well as performance
monitoring.
l TS Data Connections — Maps both workbooks and Published Data Sources to their under-
lying data connections. Useful for answering questions on what workbooks connect to what
data source, which then connects to what database(s)?
l TS Content — High-level summarized data for each View, Workbook, and Published Data

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Source on Tableau Server.

l TS Users — Aggregated information on what your users are up to on Tableau Server.

Troubleshooting
For troubleshooting (Windows | Linux), and more detailed analysis of server processes, use
Tableau Server Logs. If you need to open a support case, you will need to submit the log files.
Tableau Support will use log files to diagnose issues. To generate a log file snapshot and
upload to Tableau Support, follow these instructions (Windows | Linux).

Beginning with 2019.3 and licensed as part of the Tableau Server Management Add-on, the
Resource Monitoring Tool provides a comprehensive look at the health of Tableau Server
using a web user interface for all of its features. The Resource Monitoring Tools Agent runs on
each of the nodes in your Tableau cluster to monitor their hardware utilization, performance,
and activity, which are collated by the Resource Monitoring Tool Master Server. This includes
Tableau log files in near real time and send messages to the master server for processing and
reporting, logging slow views for specific users, and tracing down to the session level.

Alternatively, Logshark, a free open source tool, is a command line utility that you run against
Tableau Server logs to generate a set of workbooks that provide insights into system
performance, content usage, and error conditions. You should use Logshark to visualize,
investigate, and solve issues with Tableau. Some common use cases for Logshark include:

l Troubleshooting issue(s) that are recorded in the logs.

l Analyzing system metrics from log data.
l Regularly validating Tableau Server application behavior against historical data when tak-
ing a new build or making a system change.

BEST PRACTICE RECOMMENDATION:

Logshark uses the entire set of Tableau zip log files that you generate. It can be either a just
one day or several days of logs. There are many Logshark plugins, which will correspond to a
set of log files, to generate pre-built Tableau Workbooks automatically.

For viewing individual log files (Windows | Linux), Tableau Log Viewer is cross-platform, free
open source tool with a simple interface that displays Tableau log files in a columnar layout.

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Tableau Log Viewer

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Tableau Maintenance
As the use of analytics grows across your organization, Tableau will become mission-critical for
data-driven business decisions. Regular maintenance activities will keep your Tableau
deployment running in top condition. You will operationalize change management processes to
support the increased use of analytics, including performance tuning, load testing, capacity
planning, and upgrades.

Monitoring data will be the driver behind many maintenance decisions. Administrators will check
the status of the server, analyze and monitor server activity, manage scheduled tasks, and
perform other maintenance activities. This document outlines the maintenance activities
outlined in the table below:

Task Description With Frequency

Active Directory Synchronizes Active Directory groups Tableau Daily

Synchronization Server
Settings

Backup Creates a copy of content and settings in TSM CLI Daily

Production location outside of Tableau Server
Environment cluster, retained for last seven days

Restore Puts test environment in current state of TSM CLI Prior to load
Production to production environment testing, testing an
Test upgrade, or
Environment participation in
beta program

Database Remove and archive Tableau Server log TSM CLI Monthly

Maintenance/ files, temporary files, and rows from the
table http_requests in the Tableau
Log File
Server PostgreSQL database
Cleanup

Load Testing/ Understand your Tableau Server’s TabJolt Quarterly

Capacity capacity with respect to your (Windows
Planning environment, data, workload, and usage only)
profile

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Task Description With Frequency

Resource Archive stale content that has not been Custom Two to four times
Management accessed in 180 days Admin per year prior to
View upgrade

Upgrades Process to evaluate new releases and TSM CLI Agreed-upon

plan/execute the upgrade cadence among
sponsors and
project team

Active Directory Synchronization

If you are using Active Directory authentication, you should synchronize all Active Directory
groups on a regular schedule using the General tab of the Settings page for the server. If you
run Tableau Server on Linux, external directory communication is configured and managed
with an LDAP identity store. In the context of user and group synchronization, Tableau Server
configured with LDAP identity store is equivalent to Active Directory. Active Directory
synchronization features in Tableau Server function seamlessly with properly configured LDAP
directory solutions (Windows | Linux).

Back-up and Restore

A Tableau Server administrator should perform daily backups of Tableau Server and its data.
Taking these steps can help ensure that Tableau Server runs with minimum loss. You will use
the Tableau Services Manager (TSM) command line tool to back up and restore Tableau data,
including Tableau Server's own PostgreSQL database, which stores workbook and user
metadata, data extract files, server configuration data, and log files (Windows | Linux). As of
2018.2, both Windows and Linux versions of Tableau Server use TSM. For Tableau Server on
Windows 2018.1 and earlier, you will use tabadmin backup.

Database Maintenance
Database maintenance creates free space on the Tableau deployment by deleting old files,
including log files, temp files, and rows from the http_requests table. If you are running

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Tableau Server on a distributed deployment, run this command on the node that is running the
TSM Controller process. By default, the controller is on the initial node in the cluster (Windows |
Linux).

Note: If you need historical data in http_requests for audit analysis, ETL the data from the http_
requests table to another database prior to executing the cleanup commands. If cleanup
commands are part of your backup script, data in the http_requests table is truncated.

Load Testing
Load testing helps you understand your Tableau Server’s capacity with respect to your unique
environment, data, workload, and usage profile. Because data, workload, and usage will
change as new content is authored, new users are onboarded, and the use of analytics
increases, load testing should be conducted two to four times a year in conjunction with
upgrades and server scale-up or scale-out expansions.

Created by Tableau, TabJolt is a point-and-run load and performance testing utility specifically
designed for Tableau Server. It helps you understand how Tableau Server scales with
increasing workloads to inform your capacity needs. TabJolt automates user-specified loads for
any duration, while eliminating the need for script development and script maintenance, which
is often required with other load testing solutions. With increasing user loads, Tableau Server
scales nearly linearly with load by adding more nodes to the cluster for Windows and Linux.

Load testing best practices are listed below:

l Load testing should be conducted with TabJolt on an identical test environment with con-
tent restored from the production environment. This is not only from a hardware and
Tableau Server topology perspective but also in terms of data volume.
l Select representative content from your top-viewed workbooks. Often the cause of
scalability and performance issues can be workbooks being not authored with best prac-
tices in mind. If a single-user test on your workbooks shows a very slow response time,
then you should optimize those workbooks before you begin a load-testing project.
l During testing, increase the workload to 75-85% CPU utilization and < 2% error rate.
l Start with the default process configuration determined by Tableau Server’s architecture-
aware installer and scale up or out as needed when the threshold is met and sustained.
l In most cases, increasing process counts above the defaults does not improve per-
formance, unless enough hardware resources are available.

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l It is always good to know the breaking point of the Server on the level of how many user-
s/requests along with volume of data it can handle.

Developing a test plan:

l Choose representative workbooks.

l Model the expected usage.
l Think about peak usage.
l Run for at least ten minutes.
l Include think time.
l Stop other work on the server.

Capacity Planning
To ensure optimal performance and sufficient capacity to handle increased workloads, you
must plan for growth. Capacity planning allows you to scale your infrastructure with the
increased use of analytics and rapid adoption across your organization by ensuring sufficient
headroom is maintained and reducing the likelihood of resource contention and conflicts over
shared resources. Performance data, user onboarding schedules, and load testing results are
used to determine future server sizing and the capacity plan.

Factors that can influence capacity planning:

l A newly released set of data sources coupled with a dashboard that draws the attention
of the entire company.
l Increasing skills and use of analytics that become ingrained in the day-to-day operations
of the company.
l New features released in the platform, which can increase user interactivity overall.
l Change of underlying data strategy powering these dashboards, either in terms of
volume, complexity, change in database technology, user security etc.

To complete the table below, you should aggregate the count of users from the Tableau
Users on page 17 tab in the Tableau Blueprint Planner.

Year 1* Year 2 Year 3

Total Users

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Year 1* Year 2 Year 3

Nodes

Total Cores

Note: Depending on the number of users and onboarding rate, you may consider 6-month,
quarterly, or monthly intervals.

Resource Management
While site administrators should be maintaining fresh and relevant content on their sites as
outlined in Measurement of Tableau User Engagement and Adoption on page 135,
Server Administrators have oversight of the entire server and how the server’s resources are
utilized as outlined in Tableau Monitoring on page 97. The standards you define should be
documented and published on the Tableau Enablement Intranet on page 173, which is
explained in Tableau Communications on page 173.

Stale Content
If content is published with a scheduled refresh but not viewed, it is consuming system
resources and potentially making it harder for users to locate more relevant content. The
unused content will also add to backup and restore times. Work with Site administrators and/or
users to remove stale content two to four times per year. For more information, see The Stale
Content Remover Workbook.

Size Audit
Monitor content by establishing policies around workbooks and data source size. Set data-
driven alerts on the Stats for Space Usage view to identify which workbooks and data sources
exceed the expected size limit. For example, if you set a standard that extract sizes should be
less than 1 GB, then alert for anything larger.

Upgrades
Before you upgrade Tableau Server (Windows| Linux), you should review and complete the
Upgrade Checklist below and announce the expected downtime to users on the Tableau

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Enablement Intranet on page 173 as shown in Tableau Communications on page 173.

Specific tasks related to pre-TSM to TSM version upgrades are designated with an asterisk.

Research the upgrade Yes No N/A

Release Notes

What's New in Tableau Server

What's Changed - Things to Know Before You Upgrade

Upgrade from Tableau Server 2018.1 or earlier to TSM*

Comparing Functionality of tabadmin to TSM*

Upgrade process changes*

Validate sufficient capacity to support workload

Install on existing hardware

Migrate to New Hardware

Desktop and Server Compatibility 

Prepare for the upgrade Yes No N/A

Review and validate documented settings in Tableau Server Architecture &

Configuration Design Document

Customizations

SMTP configuration

SSL configuration and certificates

SAML configuration, certificates, and IdP metadata files

Kerberos configuration

OpenID configuration

Addition node(s) configuration

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Prepare for the upgrade Yes No N/A

Quantify projects, workbooks, views, data sources

Quantify users and groups

Download setup files for the new Tableau Server version

Back up Tableau Server data

Check your product maintenance status

Test the upgrade Yes No N/A

Prepare a test environment

Upgrade the test environment

Confirm Tableau Server functionality

Server processes

User access

Publishing workbooks and data sources

View published workbooks

Subscriptions and extract refreshes

Permissions

Command-line utilities and APIs

Performance and user acceptance testing

Performance Resources

Test Workbook Performance

Test new features

Communicate the planned upgrade window

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Perform the upgrade Yes No N/A

Communicate the pending upgrade

Disable subscriptions and scheduling

Create a pre-upgrade backup of Tableau Server data

Uninstall existing pre-TSM version of Tableau Server and save tsbak file to
another location*

Upgrade Tableau Server (Existing TSM version) or Upgrade from Tableau

Server 2018.1 or earlier to Tableau Server with TSM (Note: Gather existing
files section*)

Install initial node

Install other nodes in cluster

Run the upgrade script to complete the installation

Login to TSM and start Tableau Server

Restore gathered files*

Validate the upgrade

Verify status of Tableau Server processes

Verify Tableau Server settings

Enable subscriptions and scheduling

Modify Tableau Server processes (if needed)

Review User access

Verify publishing workbooks and data sources

View published workbooks

Review Permissions

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Perform the upgrade Yes No N/A

Verify Command-line utilities and APIs

Login to Tableau Server

Verify count of projects, workbooks, views, data sources

Verify count of users and groups

Verify database connectivity

Execute backup script

Communicate the successful upgrade

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Tableau Education
People who realize the full potential of analytical insights can do powerful things with their data.
But having a platform like Tableau and access to data isn't enough; organizations need to
assure that their employees are prepared to use the tools at their disposal effectively.
Additionally, businesses need accountability systems in place to make sure that technology is
being adopted and used.

No one-size-fits-all model can successfully train and enable employees with a vast diversity of
skills and backgrounds. Organizations need scalable, thoughtful plans to train and enable users
who support every area of their Tableau deployments. Without these plans, analytics programs
of any size risk failure.

From acknowledging the importance of data to adapting to modern analytics standards around
presentation, distribution, and complexity, project team members must develop an education
plan to raise the “analytical IQ” across their departments and teams. In addition to Tableau-
specific skills, users need an understanding of the company-specific processes for working with
data and comfort with technologies that help them to develop data-related skills.

This topic outlines our recommended approach to educating and enabling people throughout
the enterprise to get full value out of your data in Tableau.

Skills by Tableau Education Role

The first step in educating your users is to understand the skills they will need in order to be
successful in their roles. Successful data-driven organizations are supported by a wide variety
of people, and needed skills range from successfully viewing and interacting with data to
building high-availability into Tableau Server deployments.

The Executive Advocacy and Project Team on page 21 topic classifies users based on
roles they will play in building your organization's analytics strategy. Classifying users based on
needed skills goes one step deeper. As you dig in, you will notice similarities among these roles,
explained below.

Employees need to learn the Tableau skills unique to their roles and responsibilities within an
organization. We have categorized each unique set of Tableau skills as an Education Role.
Education Roles focus on the analytical and Tableau skills that users need to fulfill their day-to-
day job responsibilities. In contrast, Tableau Project Team Roles and Responsibilities on
page 24 identify the deployment-related tasks and responsibilities for each project team

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member. Like Project Roles, Education Roles may not exactly match users organizational
titles, but you can easily identify them by understanding the responsibilities of each role.

We identified twelve Education Roles that map to prescriptive Learning Paths that will educate
employees in the skills needed to contribute to the growth of a data-driven organization. We
recommend that you review the education needs of different organizational roles even if you
decide to self-curate education resources or to consume training courses individually.

Use the Education Role Mapping tab in the Tableau Blueprint Planner to begin building an
education strategy by mapping job titles within your organization to Education Roles.

Enable a data culture in your organization

These roles establish cultural and technical standards to align every Tableau user to the
analytics goals of your organization.

Executive Sponsor
Executive Sponsors are responsible for driving the decisions and strategies that enable their
organization's continued growth and success. They understand market pressures, what it
takes to stay competitive, and how to lead their organization forward. These leaders
recognize, embrace, and promote the importance of implementing a data-driven culture to
gain competitive advantage and understand the power of Tableau to achieve that goal.
License types vary for Executive Sponsors based on where they are most active in their
business. Their responsibilities include:

l Communicate and sell the vision for modern analytics across the organization. Rep-
resent the interests of their respective departments to establish budget and funding.
l Align the use of analytics with strategic initiatives that drive organizational trans-
formation.
l Approve Tableau Governance processes, policies, guidelines, roles, and respons-
ibilities for managing their organization's data in compliance with business and/or reg-
ulatory requirements identified by the project team.

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l Set the example of using facts over intuition by placing data at the center of every con-
versation in department meetings as a visible and vocal user of the platform.

Community Leader
Community Leaders are responsible for coordinating efforts related to user enablement around
communications, engagement, and support. Most Community Leaders also fall into a role with
heavy product usage, and will require a Creator subscription to understand how others are
using Tableau. Their responsibilities include:

l Facilitate user to user connections within the organization

l Coordinate engagement events for users within the organization
l Promote support resources for users within the organization
l Evangelize the use of analytics

Data Steward
Data Stewards understand the business domain and the interaction of business processes with
analytics. Data Stewards ensure there are documented procedures and guidelines for data
access and use and work with Database Administrators and/or Data Engineers to plan and
execute an enterprise-wide data governance, control and compliance policy. Within Tableau,
they work to curate and manage certified data sources with set user permissions in accordance
with enterprise governance policies. Data Stewards likely have a Creator license and their
responsibilities include:

l Ensure the accuracy, completeness, privacy, and security of operational data.

l Ensure that the right data is available to the right people in the organization.
l Understand the types of data the business needs.

Provide insights and develop visualization solutions

These roles use the capabilities of the Tableau platform to consume & create business
solutions that range from ad-hoc visualizations to embedded analytics.

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Consumer
Consumers use data to make more informed decisions for their lines of business. They can
range from administrative assistants to C-suite executives, but they share a goal of making
better, more informed business decisions based on dashboards and reports others in their
organization produce. Consumers likely have a Viewer license and their responsibilities
include:

l View reports and dashboards created by others and potentially serve as primary stake-
holders of these dashboards.
l Use data to make decisions day-to-day job functions, keep informed of progress toward
goals, and track team or company metrics.
l Stay knowledgeable in their subject areas even if they are not expert data analysts.

Author
Authors have a strong understanding of their market and business objectives, and they
recognize the importance of making data-driven decisions. They leverage their foundational
Tableau skills to make smarter business decisions more quickly by digging into their available
data sources to create visualizations and dashboards mostly for their own consumption.
Authors likely have a Creator license, but may also author on the web with an Explorer license. 
Their responsibilities include:

l Create and use existing data sources and create views and dashboards to provide
actionable insights in Tableau Desktop.
l Perform basic analysis for personal use rather than for consumption by others, to
increase personal job performance.
l Demonstrate knowledge of the area being analyzed.

Designer
Designers create visualizations and dashboards that help stakeholders across their
organization absorb information quickly and easily. They leverage Tableau to deliver beautiful,

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functional, and impactful dashboards. They draw on their appreciation of the art of visual design
as a clear communication tool and on their understanding of the impact that clear and engaging
visualizations can have on both internal and external audiences. Designers likely have a
Creator license and their responsibilities include:

l Demonstrate passion about visualization layout, color, appearance, and functionality.

l Ensure that their visualizations convey information accurately and efficiently to their audi-
ence.
l Create appealing dashboards that make it easy for users to explore data and gain
insights.

Analyst
Analysts are responsible for supporting their lines of business to deliver valuable insights from
data. Analysts work with complex data sources, use advanced calculations to customize data,
and use advanced features (parameters, sets, filters, and forecasting) to build a range of charts
and to analyze a variety of data types. Analysts perform ad-hoc analysis to help explore new
data questions, produce well-designed interactive dashboards that present data accurately,
and create and share data insights within their organizations for the purpose of guiding
business decisions and outcomes. Analysts likely have a Creator license and their
responsibilities include:

l Create reports and dashboards for others in the organization to consume or iterate on.
l Perform ad-hoc exploration of data to highlight business opportunities.
l Conduct meaningful data analysis to inform business decisions.

Data Scientist
Data Scientists are experts at deriving valuable insights for large and varied data sets. They are
adept at tackling big data, know how to apply advanced analytic capabilities to answer business
questions, are often domain experts, and work collaboratively across the business and IT to
deliver ROI from data. They can reduce data cleansing and preparation time in Tableau Prep
Builder, use Tableau Desktop for exploratory analysis, and develop final dashboards to support
and clearly present project findings. Data Scientists likely have a Creator license and their
responsibilities include:

l Build and deploy end-to-end solutions leveraging machine learning and advanced ana-
lytics.
l Build and test models in R, Python, or other coding languages, perform simulations, and
tune models for enterprise production.

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l Work with stakeholders throughout the organization to identify opportunities for lever-
aging company data to drive business solutions.

Developer
Developers translate the needs of the business into the software tools, applications, and
automated processes that keep their organizations lean, smart, and efficient. They leverage
Tableau to create new data products, embed visualizations and dashboards into current
solutions, improve analysis processes, and integrate organizational insights into other external
platforms and portals. Developers likely have a Creator license and their responsibilities:

l Embed and integrate Tableau vizzes into internal and external web applications (e.g.
Salesforce).
l Script automation tasks.
l Build web data connections to bring in data from sources without native connectors in
Tableau.
l Create custom data extracts.
l Create Dashboard Extension add-ins for customized workflows in Tableau.

Deploy and manage Tableau

These roles plan scalable deployments of Tableau Server or Tableau Online and once in
production, ensure that users can access what they need when they need it.

Site Administrator
Site Administrators manage, monitor, and maintain sites on Tableau Server or Tableau Online.
They manage site organization, content publishing, groups, users, and permissions. Through
their monitoring efforts, they know the latest details on site utilization, adoption, performance,
and compliance. Site Administrators are key to the adoption of Tableau Server or Tableau
Online in their organizations. Site Administrators have a Creator license and their
responsibilities include:

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l Create and manage site users and groups.

l Create projects to organize site content.
l Assign content permissions to users and groups.
l Monitor site metrics such as content usage, success of extract refresh tasks, and user
activity.
l Troubleshoot user issues with a site.

Server Administrator
Server Administrators ensure that their installation of Tableau Server runs smoothly. Key
elements include securing the server, managing licenses, managing users, monitoring and
troubleshooting server issues, and performing server maintenance. Server Administrators work
tirelessly to ensure that Tableau Server is not only operational but meets the ongoing needs of
the enterprise. Server Administrators have a Creator license and their responsibilities include:

l Install and configure Tableau Server.

l Perform server maintenance (e.g., backups, updates).
l Monitor server performance and usage.
l Manage all sites, users, groups, and content on Tableau Server.
l Create sites.

Server Architect
Server Architects plan Tableau Server deployments and ensure their success. Key success
factors include integrating the deployment with preferred authentication options, monitoring
server, and scaling server overtime to meet enterprise demand. Once implementation is
complete, server architects maintain the deployment and help to investigate and resolve server
issues. Their responsibilities include:

l Plan enterprise server deployments.

l Configure server authentication options.
l Monitor, maintain, and scale server deployments to satisfy business requirements.
l Automate server monitoring and maintenance tasks.
l Investigate and resolve server issues.

Skills by Tableau License Type

License type defines the features and functionality available when using Tableau products. In
large deployments, learning paths defined in Skills by Tableau Education Role on page 119

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are a best practice. In smaller deployments, however, users may act in many different
organizational roles, and determining skills needed by license type may be sufficient.

We list education resources aligned to Tableau licenses here. Free resources supplement the
formal training that helps to build a holistic, foundational understanding of the platform.
Organizations that wish to collate free resources to build their own training curriculum may do
so; however, we recommend comparing the resources required to develop and maintain an
internal education program versus using Tableau Education. In addition to being actively
managed and consistently updated by Tableau, Tableau Education classes prepare users for
Tableau product certification exams .

Tableau Creator Skills

Users with Tableau Creator licenses have access to the entire Tableau platform to analyze
data and to build content for themselves and their organizations. These users perform tasks
that range from basic analysis to using Tableau's advanced functionality to inform business
decisions.

Resources for Tableau Creators include:

l eLearning for the Creator

l Desktop I Classroom Course
l Desktop II Classroom Course
l Desktop III Classroom Course
l Prep Classroom Course
l Visual Analytics Classroom Course
l Free Training Videos

Additional ancillary skills can be beneficial. For example, the following general competencies
required to be a Tableau Creator can be summarized as:

l General data knowledge — How to connect to and prepare data, general data struc-
tures, joins, and basic SQL.
l Analytics best practices — Generating data questions, data visualization, data
storytelling.
l Business knowledge — Familiarity with the business challenges and metrics monitored
by business leaders.
l Design fundamentals — Layout/design of dashboards, infographics, and other graph-
ical documents.

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Most Server Administrators and Site Administrators also have Creator licenses. They are
responsible for installing, administering and maintaining servers and server sites used at their
organizations. They are responsible for security, performance, governance, and scalability for
their users.

Resources for Tableau Site or Server Administrators include:

l eLearning for the Creator

l Server Administration Classroom Course
l Server Architect Classroom Course
l Free Training Videos

Other ancillary knowledge needed for Server Administrators, which are defined in more detail in
Tableau Deployment:

l Scripting for automation

l Command line interfaces and APIs
l Server sizing and topology
l Network infrastructure and protocols

Tableau Explorer Skills

Users with Tableau Explorer licenses author simple visualizations through the web, navigate
Tableau Server or Tableau Online environments, and understand the principles for creating
effective views with data. Resources for Tableau Explorers include:

l eLearning for the Explorer

l Web Authoring Classroom Course
l Free Training Videos

Additional ancillary skills can be beneficial for Explorers, such as:

l Analytics best practices – Generating data questions, data visualization, data storytelling
l Business knowledge — Familiarity with the business challenges and metrics monitored
by business leaders
l Design fundamentals — Layout/design of dashboards, infographics, and other graphical
documents

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Tableau Viewer Skills

Users with Tableau Viewer licenses navigate Tableau Server or Tableau Online environments,
read various chart types, and know how to interact with visualizations.

Resources for Tableau Viewers include:

l Free Consumer Learning Path

l Free Executive Sponsor Learning Path
l Free Training Videos

Developing a Tableau Education Plan

An education plan outlines how your employees will gain the skills needed to be successful in
their roles. Before considering enablement options, it is important to identify who your users
are and what skills they need to fulfill their specific responsibilities to make your Tableau
deployment successful. Find more information about defining your users in Tableau
Education Role Mapping on page 15.

Education is an ongoing process, and users need readily available tools to stay up to date on
the latest product or feature releases. A well thought out plan streamlines skill development for
existing and new users. As you consider enablement options, think about the following:

l Who are your users and how many are in each role? This information can be
aggregated from the Tableau Users on page 17 in the Tableau Blueprint Planner.
l Where are they located? Users can be in a single location or spread across multiple
locations.
l How quickly do they need to get up and running? Consider organizational-level ini-
tiatives or goals that are impacted by the success of your users.
l How do they like to learn? Some learners prefer an immersive classroom exper-
ience, while others prefer self-paced learning that accommodates their day-to-day work.

These answers will help you determine which enablement options best fit your users
individually and your organization as a whole.

Learning Paths
Role-based learning paths are designed to accelerate user proficiency. Each path is curated
by product experts to provide users with the right resources at the right time. Learning paths
include self-paced eLearning content, classroom courses, free resources, and assessments

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available through Tableau’s eLearning platform. Learning paths guide users in each Education
Role to develop the necessary skills while encouraging those with existing analytic skills to
accelerate to more advanced levels. For more information, see education products on the
Learning Paths overview.

Learning Paths map to Skills by Tableau Education Role on page 119 and provide clear
paths for every role you’ve identified in your organization. Users may need to complete multiple
paths if their responsibilities fall across more than one Education Role.

All Learning Paths are included in the eLearning for the Creator subscription, and a subset
(Executive Sponsor, Community Leader and Consumer) are available in the eLearning for the
Explorer subscription (some paths include classroom courses at additional cost).

Enable a Data Culture:

l Executive Sponsor (free)

l Community Leader (free)
l Data Steward

Provide insights and develop visualization solutions:

l Consumer (free)
l Author
l Designer
l Analyst
l Data Scientist
l Developer

Deploy and manage an optimized environment:

l Site Administrator
l Server Administrator
l Server Architect

In addition to curated skill building activities, each learning path includes knowledge checks to
ensure the concepts and skills learned are being fully absorbed. Each learning path ends with a
skills assessment that covers the core concepts from the path. Upon passing the assessment,
the user is awarded a Role Badge (more information about Role Badges here). A user who
does not pass is given a detailed list of lessons to review before attempting the assessment
again.

To explore content from each learning path, see Tableau eLearning samples.

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Education Resources
Role-based learning paths are the most scalable and consistent way to enable users (link to
Learning Path Landing Page) However, paid training courses and other resources can also be
consumed individually. This allows an organization to add resources to a learning path in order
to increase the breadth or depth of a user’s skill set, if needed.

l eLearning – Tableau eLearning is web-based training users can consume at their own
pace. Courses are interactive and designed to help users learn how to use Tableau,
regardless of skill level. Subscriptions include access to Learning Paths and courses.
l Classroom Courses – Comprehensive instructor-led training allows users to get up to
speed quickly. Available in-person in cities worldwide or virtual, classroom courses are
designed to provide a distraction-free learning environment. Organizations with large
groups of people requiring training at the same time may save time and money by choos-
ing to have a Tableau trainer lead classes on-site.
l Free Training Videos – These pre-recorded videos supplement formal training and are
a great way to quickly orient users to a specific feature or concept. These videos are not
intended for stand-alone training and should be paired with a more formal training solu-
tion.
l On-Demand Webinars – This library of webinars acts as a repository for knowledge
sharing for everything from Tableau product releases to niche industry topics.

Organizations wishing to curate their own training materials for Tableau users will need to
collate Tableau documentation, videos, and other ancillary skill resources for corresponding
job functions. Organize these materials into programs that provide recommended coursework
with sequential skill and knowledge development.

In addition to Tableau’s education resources, add your own organizational context to help
users learn how to apply these product skills to their day-to-day job functions, company
sources of data, and organizational best practices. Internal programs should have clear goals
and deadlines, and users should have adequate time to meet them.

Accountability and Reward Systems

Accountability and reward systems are series of checkpoints and milestones along a user's
skill development path.  They establish common goals and achievements across an
organization to encourage users to stay motivated and engaged in building their skill sets.

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Education is an ongoing process, and as an organization's deployment grows, users need

opportunities for continuous learning and rewards.

Consider these three approaches to validate skills to incorporate into your education plan:

l Role Badges
l Tableau Product Certification
l Skill Belts

Role Badges
Users earn role badges by passing low-stakes, multiple-choice skills assessments of core
concepts at the end of role-based learning paths as shown in Skills by Tableau Education
Role on page 119. Role badges encourage and motivate users to keep learning in order to
demonstrate their knowledge of particular roles. Users are not required to complete all the
courses in a learning path in order to take the skills assessment, so more advanced users can
skip ahead. They will demonstrate that they hold the necessary skills for the role by earning a
passing score. Users who do not pass are given recommendations for the eLearning or
Classroom courses that will best answer their skill gaps. Because Role Badges are available to
share via a public URL, they also support progress monitoring and measurement at the
organizational level. The badges can be incorporated into your organization's LMS system or
intranet. Role Badges and Skills Assessments are accessed through an eLearning subscription.

Certification
Tableau Product Certifications enable users to prove their expertise and to distinguish
themselves. Holding a Tableau Certification demonstrates that a user is able to apply
knowledge of Tableau products in a formal setting. These proctored exams are higher stakes
than role badge skills assessments because they follow industry standards for professional
certification programs. Encouraging and supporting certification within your teams shows
commitment to their professional development and creates clear, actionable milestones for
individuals to work toward. By building a core group of certified users, you increase their
confidence and encourage them to elevate the skill sets of their peers. There are three levels of
certification, Specialist, Associate and Professional, available for two products, Desktop and
Server.

Exam Level By Product

Difficulty Specialist Tableau Desktop Specialist – Coming soon

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increases tests foundational functionality

↓ and product comprehension.

Associate Tableau Desktop Certified Tableau Server Certified

Associate – tests comprehensive Associate – tests  administrative
functionality and product functionality and platform
expertise. knowledge.

Professional Tableau Desktop Certified Tableau Server Certified

Professional – tests advanced Professional – tests
functionality and application of architectural knowledge and
visual best practices. platform integration expertise.

Online, proctored exams are delivered 24/7 . Instead of traveling to testing centers, users can
test anywhere in the world if they meet computer and network requirements. Exams are also
delivered in person at select Tableau events, like Tableau Conference.

NOTE: How are Certification badges different from role badges?

Certification badges recognize users' significant achievement of proving product
knowledge by passing high-stakes, proctored, secure exams. Role badges recognize
users' less significant achievement of passing self-proctored, non-secure skills
assessments.

Skill Belts
A skill belt program is an internally-created badge and reward program that aligns with an
internally curated education program. A skill belt program should motivate and reward users
who sequentially build measurable knowledge in product functionality, storytelling, design,
best practices in visualization and performance, and community resources. In order to
complete each skill level, users should be required to volunteer as peer and mentor resources
for new applicants. This ensures participation and organically builds community across the
organization by encouraging users to share knowledge, evangelize data-driven decision
making, and motivate others to improve their Tableau skills.

A skill belt program relies on both applicants and champions for administration, governance,
and promotion. You may have additional resources to help administer the program. For

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example, many large organizations have learning management systems and may prefer to
manage assessments within those content delivery systems.

Required content and measurement tools can be standardized across skill belts and merit
badges; for example:

l Hands-on — Instructional videos or webinars for users to follow along with, often includ-
ing accompanying Tableau workbooks.
l Whitepapers — Written, long-form instructional documents for users to read.
l Best practices — Consumable content in a variety of formats that generally focuses on
visual and performance best practices. Content will include more technical and gov-
ernance-related topics as users achieve higher skill levels.
l Storytelling — Consumable content in a variety of formats that specifically addresses the
soft skills users need to effectively tell stories with data.
l Blogs — Informational content from a variety of sources, generally from Tableau or not-
able public community figures like Zen Masters. Content may include hands-on activities,
best practices, or additional resources.
l Reference materials — Reference documents, community guides (e.g., GitHub), other
instructional reference materials (e.g., chart hierarchy) and other supplemental mater-
ials.
l Challenges —Tableau workbook practices for users to complete, with solutions included
for reference.
l Milestones — Significant tasks users must complete to achieve a skill belt or a merit
badge.

You should not expect everyone to engage in all the available content, nor to master all the
available skills at every skill belt level. Advancement through the program should be based on
exposure to concepts and building knowledge, not mastery. For example, users can achieve
expert-level recognition without having to learn to script in Python. Only some users need to
script in Python, but all users need to demonstrate an understanding of how Python and
Tableau can be used together and, more importantly, how this can help the organization.

Gamification
A defining characteristic of any skill belt program is the gamification of learning. Gamification is
an educational approach to motivate students to learn by using game elements and design in a
learning environment. It can help users overcome fatigue or anxiety and keep them engaged.
By incorporating the right mechanics, gamification can increase engagement and participation
and inspire users to continue learning.

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One successful way to gamify is by offering compensation or a reward (e.g., organizational

status) for academic achievements, proper behavior and social engagement like helping
peers, commenting, and adding value. Skill belts and merit badges can be designed to
recognize academic achievement and volunteerism while communicating status or prestige
within your organization. To encourage engagement, you should come up with fun skill belt
and badge names. "Jedi Master" sounds a lot more exciting that "Analytics Expert." Perhaps
you want to involve your community in picking the belt names (e.g., a contest). If your
community picks the names, they are already invested in success before you have kicked off
the program.

Another important feature of gamification is to make the program as social as possible to

simulate the feel of a classroom or classroom community. This is important for achievers that
need peer recognition, but also motivates through peer pressure or friendly competition with
other participants. You can have a leader board to display top scores and vizzes, for example.
We also suggest events such as Makeover Monday and Viz Games to increase competition
and provide additional reward and recognition opportunities. Lastly, the program should be
transparent to participants. While advancing within the course work users know what the next
step is and what to expect. This creates anticipation! Anticipation is a strong motivator and gets
students excited and engaged for longer periods of time and the flow of learning.

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Measurement of Tableau User

Engagement and Adoption
As Tableau is deployed broadly across your organization to users of all skill levels,
administrators need to ensure that the content that is being created and consumed is
discoverable, fresh, and relevant to your audiences. To accomplish this, administrators should
measure the user engagement and adoption.

Measurement helps your deployment to operate at scale and evolve. It helps you understand
user behaviors—who is creating and consuming content and the quality, the relevance of the
dashboards and data sources being published, and the use of certified versus sandbox. If
content isn’t being consumed, you will be able to identify it and take the appropriate next steps.

Understanding the relationship between data sources and workbook content, users, and server
performance, scalability, and sizing is a reliable way to look into current usage and future
growth. Open communication between Server Administrators and Site Administrators is needed
to plan for new users and use cases on the platform. Consider this:

l A team or group of users has a known collection of sources of data that can be identified
and prepared for them as Published Data Sources or embedded in workbooks.
l Published Data Sources, as well as embedded data sources, are used to populate dash-
boards.
l Dashboards have a specific audience, or group of users who should view them. User
engagement drives server scalability and sizing decisions.
l Server sizing decisions define hardware and licensing requirements, which are aligned with
budget planning and procurement requests.

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Tableau Administrative Roles and Respons-

ibilities
Depending on the size of the organization and deployment, measurement and monitoring
responsibilities may be split across different teams. For example, a systems administrator may
be responsible for the hardware and operating system only, while Tableau Server
Administrators will monitor and track key application metrics and Site Administrators will
measure content metrics in their respective site(s). Both are equally important for overall
success.

If there are no Site Administrators, both application and content metrics should be monitored
and measured by the Server Administrator. Regardless of the deployment size, system
performance is a shared responsibility among administrators and users. For more information
on hardware metrics, see Tableau Monitoring on page 97.

Tableau Administrative Views

Data from the Tableau Server repository will be analyzed using default administrative views
and custom administrative views. Administrative views are dashboards that are included with
Tableau Server and help you understand how users are interacting with content. Site
Administrators have access to Tableau Server’s default administrative views.

Find Administrative Views on the Status Page

Brief descriptions of the site default administrative views are shown below. Site Administrators
should view these on a weekly basis to understand the users’ behavior.

l Traffic to Views — Usage and users for published views. Compare the traffic to the expec-
ted audience size.
l Traffic to Data Sources — Usage and users for published data sources. Compare the
traffic to the expected audience size.
l Actions by All Users — Actions for all users to see site activities.

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l Actions by Specific User — Actions for a specific user, including items used.
l Actions by Recent Users — Recent actions by users, including last action time and idle
time.
l Background Tasks for Extracts — Completed, pending, and failed extract task details with
full details of why an error occurred.
l Background Tasks for Non Extracts — Completed, pending, and failed non-extract back-
ground task details with full details on why an error occurred.
l Stats for Load Times — View load times and performance history. Set data-driven alerts on
long view load times using the version of the default admin views workbook you down-
loaded and published with extracted data sources.
l Stats for Space Usage — Space used by published workbooks and data sources, including
extracts and live connections. Set data-driven alerts on the Stats for Space Usage view to
identify which workbooks and data sources exceed the expected size limit. For example, if
you set a standard that extract sizes should be less than 1 GB, then alert for anything larger.

Custom administrative views are useful for deeper analysis of user behaviors and organization-
specific KPIs that are identified. The Tableau Server Administrator will extract and publish the
default administrative views workbook and community data sources so others can perform
deeper analysis on users within your site. This will permit users and project leaders who
manage content (but are not full administrators) to view and measure consumption. The list of
recommended published data sources is shown below:

l TS Users — Aggregated information on user activity.

l TS Content — High-level, summarized data for each view, workbook, and Published Data
Source on Tableau Server.
l TS Background Tasks — Primarily for analyzing Extract Refresh and Subscription tasks that
are run on Backgrounder processes.
l TS Events — Essentially a master audit data source showing events happening on Tableau
Server—users signing in, accessing views, publishing content, etc.
l TS Data Connections — Maps both workbooks and published data sources to their under-
lying data connections. Useful for answering questions aboout what workbooks connect to
what data source, which then connects to what database(s)?

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Tableau Server Content Utilization

Utilization is the effective use of the data visualizations for business decisions but the complete
picture cannot be told through Traffic to Views alone. When viewing this data, put it in the
context of your expected audience size that was documented on the Use Cases tab of the
Tableau Blueprint Planner.

For example, if a Published Data Source has an audience of 500 users who should use it at
least once a day, then we would expect the Traffic to Views dashboard to show approximately
10,000 views in a month (20 business days * 500 users). Now, if 250 people view the
dashboard 2 times a day, then you’re at 50% engagement and that’s your cue to understand
whether the information is relevant, there is a skills gap, or half the audience doesn’t realize
that such a dashboard that will help them do their job even exists.

Individual content creators can see utilization for their content in the sparkline tooltip by
hovering over the workbook’s thumbnail or selecting Who Has Seen This View from the menu.

Content Utilization

1. Within a site or project, what is the view traffic? (Monthly) — Understanding the usage
trend for a site and project will help you understand growth or whether additional com-
munity activities can educate users on available content. Below, you can see traffic in the
project represented in red has dropped off dramatically, while the remaining colors at the
bottom are flat.

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2. What is view traffic in last 180 days vs 30 Days? (Monthly) — Low traffic views should be
reviewed and archived based on activity threshold within a time period. If content is pub-
lished but not viewed, it is consuming system resources and potentially making it harder for
users to locate more relevant content. Your server administrator can automate archiving
per site. In the example below, only three dashboards (orange) have had been accessed in
the last 30 days.

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3. What is a workbook’s audience size relative to access events? (Monthly) — When identi-
fying use cases for new content, you should estimate the audience size for a particular
workbook. By comparing the distinct count of consumers to the number of access events,
you can understand the impact of content. Content in the lower left (low audience/low
traffic) should be reviewed and removed if it is no longer useful.

4. What is a data source’s audience size relative to access events? (Monthly) — Similar to the
previous example, when identifying use cases for new content, you should estimate the
audience size for a particular data source. By comparing the distinct count of consumers to
the number of access events, you can understand the impact of content. Content in the

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lower left (low audience/low traffic) should be reviewed and removed if it is no longer useful.

5. Who is creating/owning content? (Monthly) — Users who create and share content are put-
ting your organization’s modern analytics vision into practice. To understand who is pub-
lishing to Tableau Server, review project, workbook, and certified and uncertified data
source owners.

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Tableau User Engagement

Engagement is a measure of user behavior, both direct and indirect. Direct engagement
includes viewing and interacting with a dashboard, connecting to a data source, and web
authoring. Indirect engagement includes subscriptions and alerts that are delivered to a user.

1. How many times have users logged in? (Monthly) — To measure user engagement, you
should start by quantifying the number of logins, users who login once and didn’t return,
and users who never logged in. If twelve users have logged in once and didn’t return, you
should determine why.

Login Frequency

2. Is the use of content becoming habitual? (Monthly) — Quantifying the number of days
since last login is a good indicator of whether users are in Tableau Server. For example,
with 4,065 users logging in to Tableau Server from 0-49 days, use of Tableau Server is
high. This can be especially useful if HR data is joined to view engagement within a depart-
ment or team.

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Days Since Last Login

3. Are subscriptions and alerts being used? (Monthly) — It’s important to consider the direct
(publish, view, and interact) and indirect (subscriptions and alerts) activity on Tableau
Server. Even if users are not interacting directly with content, they may be receiving emails
from subscriptions and alerts.

Subscriptions & Alerts

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Content Size and Performance

Performance is a shared responsibility in Tableau Server because of the cumulative effects of
slow dashboards and long-running extract refreshes can have on the entire system. Based on
performance thresholds you define, you should work with users to improve performance to
expectations. The dashboards below can be found in the default administrative views on
Tableau Server.

1. What is the distribution of workbook and data source size? (Weekly)

2. How long does it take for views to load? (Weekly) — Have you set a load time expectation
to identify when a workbook is loading too slowly? Do you have an exception procedure in
place?

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3. How are extracts performing? (Weekly) — See the successes and failures of extracts and
determine if you’re experiencing long extract refresh times.

4. Are subscriptions delivered on time? (Weekly)

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Compliance
Compliance is the measure of how users are following internal company policies and
procedures and external regulations where applicable. Below are some examples of policies to
be defined or may already be in place:

1. Are usernames and passwords using a service account or an individual account? (Weekly)
2. Are embedded passwords elevating permissions for data access? (Weekly)
3. When implementing Row Level Security at Tableau Data Source or Dashboard level are
appropriate measures taken on user permissions? Such as who can and cannot do edit-
ing/download? Can the RLS be pushed to database level?
4. Are visual styles being adhered to? (Colors, branding, type of visualization, etc.)

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Analytics Best Practices in Tableau

Analytics best practices enable your users with guidelines, standards, and processes for the
discovery, interpretation, and presentation of data. In addition to the common best practices
listed here, consider what additional organization-specific practices you will layer on top to
enable your users with repeatable processes that will evolve into analytical capabilities.

Once defined, you should publish your organizational best practices to the Tableau
Enablement Intranet on page 173. A mix of pre-recorded content, web meetings, and in-
person sessions should also be used to introduce, reinforce, and institutionalize best practices
as part of transforming into a data-driven organization. While not intended to be an exhaustive
list, this document compiles some of the most common analytics best practices.

Why Visual Analytics?

Visual analytics is a means of exploring and understanding data. It supports and accelerates
the analysis process itself. You can ask a question, get the answer, and ask follow-up
questions—all within a visual interface. A story unfolds from one visual summary to another.
Later, you can retrace the story to rethink, explore further, and share. In short, visual analytics
allows you to go in any direction with your thoughts while you view and interact directly with the
data.

Pre-attentive Attributes
Visual analytics leverages pre-attentive attributes to guide you down the most useful paths. Pre-
attentive attributes are information we can process visually almost immediately, before sending
the information to the attention processing parts of our brain. The pre-attentive attributes are
shown below.

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Pre-attentive Attributes

These are generally the best ways to present data, because we can see these patterns without
thinking or processing. In fact, these attributes evolved in humans as ways to quickly assess a
situation, discern a pattern, and choose whether to react. When authoring visualizations in
Tableau, content creators will be visually encoding data to reveal new insights.

Explaining Visual Encoding

As you deploy Tableau broadly across the organization, some people will see the immediate
value of visual analytics while others may hold on to traditional spreadsheets or reports in a
tabular format. You will likely need to communicate the value of visual analytics and help those
people see data differently by walking through what’s possible when data is visually encoded—
namely by using color, shape, and size.

The steps below are helpful in making data visualizations more familiar if you are creating them
for someone else. First, start with a familiar tabular format. Here is an example of how
someone might view sales and profit in a text table. To find the highest and lowest values, it
requires a full table scan of the rows and columns.

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Tabular Data, Plain

Adding color to negative numbers and formatting them with parentheses makes them stand
out, but only if you’re looking for negative numbers. For everything else, a table scan is required
to compare values.

Tabular Data with a Color for Negative Values

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Next, as an intermediate format between a text table and a full visualization, color can be
applied to the sales and profit measures individually to show high and low values, but it still
requires the viewer to reconcile ranges of color between the two measures.

Tabular Data with Sales and Profitability by Color Gradients

Finally, show the full visualization with sales encoded by length and profit encoded by color.
Immediately, the viewer can see highest sales and lowest profit.

Visual Data with Sales by Bar Length, Profitability by Color

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Using this approach, you will be able to introduce and explain the benefits of visual analysis to
your organization’s Tableau users. You should record your own introduction video and post it
on the enablement intranet.

The Cycle of Visual Analysis

Visual analysis is a non-linear process. For example, a user might start with an initial task or
question in mind, find relevant data, and prepare it for analysis. During analysis, she realizes
that she needs additional data, so she goes back a couple of steps to get more data, choose a
new visual mapping, and develop a new insight. This example can be repeated for any of the
other steps of the cycle of visual analysis.

The flow of analysis is difficult or impossible to achieve in traditional BI. Instead of exploiting the
power of visual cues and iteration, it is heavily milestone-driven. Requirements gathering leads
to development, then to testing, and eventually to launch. With visual analysis, the steps
become more fluid as the answer to one question often leads to other questions, and new
insights are uncovered.

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Start with Questions

Whether you are authoring for yourself or for others, the cycle of visual analysis starts with a
task or business questions to be answered. When asking data questions, start with a broad
topic then add specificity to each question. For example, a call center manager’s questions
from summary to detail might look like the following:

l How many calls are received monthly?

l Where do the calls come from?
l What are the top call types?
l Who answers the most/least calls?

Often the person analyzing the data also understands the underlying business questions. In
other cases, someone might come to you with a need for a dashboard and what business
questions it needs to address. Regardless of what the process of requesting this kind of
assistance is, the steps for success are similar. 

l Build rapport for a productive working relationship built on trust. Find out about their
experiences and try to speak their language.
l Ask open-ended questions like "What do you want this dashboard to tell you?" or "What
question do you want to answer?" rather than "Do you want a line graph?" or "Should I
make a trend line?"
l Use examples: Show existing dashboards and ask what would make them better.

Get Data
Your users have questions that can be answered with data, but do they know how to find the
right source of data and connect to it? From a variety of structured, semi-structured, and raw
sources of data to siloed data within different departments of the organization, knowing where
to get the right data is one of greatest barriers to becoming a data-driven organization.

During the discovery process, the Tableau Data and Analytics Survey on page 12 in the
Tableau Blueprint Planner identified key sources of data and how data is distributed and
consumed within each department or team. With specific sources of data documented on the
Tableau Use Cases and Data Sources on page 13 tab of the Tableau Blueprint Planner,
you should prioritize which ones will be most impactful by audience size and create Published
Data Sources in Tableau Server.

Beyond the initial use cases, content creators should understand how to get data to answer
new business questions. Using the Data & Analytics Survey is a repeatable way to discover
new use cases and assess whether the needed data exists already in Tableau Server. If it is

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already available as a Published Data Source, then content creators can connect to it and begin
analyzing it. If it does not exist, authors should collaborate with Data Stewards and work with the
data they have—even sample data files—and prototype with the data available, rather than
waiting to proceed with a perfect operationalized dataset. Once the full data set is available, the
operationalized dataset will replace the sample.

Choose Visual Mapping

After getting data, content creators will start to explore data by adding measures and
dimensions to the view, and Tableau presents users with the most effective visualization. At any
time in the authoring of content, the type of visualization can be changed. As creators explore
the data and visually encode it with the pre-attentive attributes, they will be able to derive
insights from it.

Choosing the appropriate type of visual mapping for the type of analysis is critical for deriving
insights and driving towards action. There are five primary types of visual mappings that content
creators and consumers should understand:

l Comparison, represented as a bar

l Spatial, represented as a map
l Temporal, represented as a line
l Compare two measures, represented as a scatterplot
l Precise number, represented as a text table

View Data
Tableau visualizations often show the unexpected—relationships, outliers, and trends. A
surprise finding stimulates the thought process, encouraging deeper analysis or a different path
of exploration. Tableau’s interaction model is based on the concept of incremental change:
Whenever you perform an action (e.g., filter), Tableau instantly shows you the new result.

Why is incremental change important? It lets us intuitively explore a broad space of possible
visualizations to find the right one. It allows us to focus on the exploration task, where questions
lead not just to answers but also to more questions. It also lets us learn visual analytics at our
own pace. We can build sophisticated representations of data slowly and incrementally as we
learn how to look at information. Tableau’s interface is based on the process of incrementally
refining a question into an answer. Every Tableau user, not just analysts, to be able to derive
meaningful information from data and base their decisions on data.

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Develop Insights
Data analysis and data visualization were once separate tasks. An analyst would run queries
or write calculations to get answers from a data source, and then export results as a specified
chart or graph. But by making the process querying data visual, you explore your data in a
richer, more meaningful way. With visual analytics you can build an analysis and learn from it
simultaneously as opportunities for further investigation present themselves.

Critical thinking with data is about finding insight, and communicating the insights in an optimal,
engaging way. Visual analytics makes asking and answering questions of your data intuitive,
regardless of whether you are a creator or a consumer—as we continue to ask “why”.

Critical thinking with data is important to the decision-making process for both content creators
(often analysts, developers or data scientists) as well as for information consumers. Both
groups should ask themselves these questions as they develop insights:

l What question should I ask?

l And when I get the answer, do I trust it?
l Do I have the ability to question if my data is useful? If it’s correct?
l Am I using all the facts? Am I trying to confirm biases I have?

Act (Share)
Shared findings lead to actions, results, and solutions. In fact, unshared discoveries are
useless. You can share different types of content via Tableau Server:

l Tableau Prep Flows: Prep flows can be published to Tableau Server and scheduled to run
when you need them to with Prep Conductor.
l Published Data Sources: You can publish data sources that others can use to build new
workbooks. A data source can contain a direct (or live) connection to your database or an
extract you can refresh on a schedule. For more information, see Best Practices for Pub-
lished Data Sources and Enabling Governed Data Access with Tableau Data Server.
l Workbooks: Workbooks contain your views, dashboards, and stories, and data con-
nection. You can include local resources, such as background images and custom geo-
coding, if they reside in a location that the server or other Tableau users cannot access.

A dashboard checklist is a useful resource to ensure that published content meets the purpose
and answers the business questions intended. Data stewards should also play a role to ensure
correctness and review an embedded data source as a potential candidate for publishing and
certifying. Beyond data and calculation correctness, content validation should also include a
review of the branding, layout, formatting, performance, filters, dashboard actions, and edge

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case behaviors by the Site Administrator or Project Leader site roles. For more information on
content validation, promotion, and certification, see Tableau Governance on page 31.

Visual Best Practices

Visual best practices are key to developing informative visualizations that drive your audience to
act. A dashboard is successful when people can easily use it to derive answers. Even a beautiful
dashboard with an interesting data source could be rendered useless if your audience can’t use
it to discover insights.

Think not just as an analyst but also as a designer and consumer. Dashboards should have
interactive elements that are discoverable and predictable, follow a sensible, logical layout, and
have a simplified design that makes complex decisions easier. It is important not to assume that
people automatically know what it takes to clearly and effectively communicate with data. Here
are a few whitepaper links to share on your enablement intranet:

l Visual analysis guidebook

l Which chart or graph is right for you?
l Good enough to great
l Designing efficient workbooks

You can find a list of books by renowned data visualization experts in the appendix. Adding
these whitepapers and books to the resources of your analytics community can lead to a
deeper understanding and internalization of visual best practices.

Audience
The best visualizations have a clear purpose and work for their intended audience. It’s
important to know what you are trying to say and who you are saying it to. Does your audience
know this subject matter extremely well or will it be new to them? What kind of cues will they
need? Thinking about these questions before you begin designing will help you create a
successful dashboard. For example, you would present aggregated, summary-level data and
KPIs to an executive audience rather than row-level transactions.

Context
Make sure your views include context. Titles, captions, units, and commentary all help your
audience to better understand your data view. Always strive to tell stories with your data and

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your visuals. Understand that good stories involve more than just data, and consider the
following:

l Mind your aesthetics and know that what is effective is often affective. In other words, an
effective view can create an emotional response and a genuine communication to your
audience.
l Style is also important. Make sure that your views are consistent and pleasing to the eye.
Your views are representative of who you are and what you care about.
l Dashboards that people can interact with are very engaging. Interactive elements allow
your audience to manipulate the data, ask and answer questions, and arrive at findings on
their own. This helps to foster trust in your data.
l Make your views vivid and memorable. Pay attention to structure and context.

Chart Choice
Chart choice should depend on the question you are trying to answer or a specific insight you
are trying to communicate. There is almost always a trade-off involved, with different chart
types each having their own advantages and downsides. You should always ask yourself if
your chosen chart type best conveys the message you are trying to share and if it can be easily
understood by your audience. The table below explains the chart types in Tableau’s Show Me
panel and when to use each. This should be published to your enablement intranet to educate
new users.

Chart Description

Line — Viewing trends in data over time.

Examples: Stock price change over a five-year period, website page views
during a month, revenue growth by quarter.

Bar — Comparing data across categories.

Examples: Volume of shirts in different sizes, website traffic by origination site,

percent of spending by department.

Heat Map — Showing the relationship between two factors.

Examples: Segmentation analysis of target market, product adoption across

regions, sales leads by individual rep.

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Chart Description

Highlight Table — Providing detailed information on heat maps.

Examples: The percent of a market for different segments, sales numbers in a

particular region, population of cities in different years.

Treemap — Showing hierarchical data as a proportion of a whole.

Examples: Storage usage across computer machines, managing the number

and priority of technical support cases, comparing fiscal budgets between years.

Gantt — Showing duration over time.

Examples: Project timeline, duration of a machine’s use, availability of players on

a team.

Bullet — Evaluating performance of a metric against a goal.

Examples: Sales quota assessment, actual spending vs. budget, performance

spectrum (great/good/poor).

Scatterplot — Investigating the relationship between different variables.

Examples: Male versus female likelihood of having lung cancer at different ages,
technology early adopters’ and laggards’ purchase patterns of smart phones,
shipping costs of different product categories to different regions.

Histogram — Understanding the distribution of your data.

Examples: Number of customers by company size, student performance on an

exam, frequency of a product defect.

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Chart Description

Symbol maps — Use for totals rather than rates. Be careful, as small differences
will be hard to see.

Examples: Number of customers in different geographies.

Area maps — Use for rates rather than totals. Use sensible base geography.

Examples: Rates of internet-usage in certain geographies, house prices in

different neighborhoods.

Box-and-Whisker — Showing the distribution of a set of a data.

Examples: Understanding your data at a glance, seeing how data is skewed

towards one end, identifying outliers in your data.

Layout
How your audience “reads” your dashboard is not a trivial consideration. Your dashboard’s
purpose is to help guide the reader’s eye through multiple views in coordination and tell the
story of each insight. Your dashboard needs a sensible “flow” and a logical layout of different
pieces of information. The more you employ better dashboard design, your users will discover
what’s happening, why, and what’s most important. Consider how you’re guiding their eyes
across the dashboard. Are you showing the user where to look next?

Design theory gives us plenty of advice on how best to succeed. Layout is a key component of
any successful dashboard design, here are a few concepts you want to think about when
building visualizations:

l Newspaper or Z-layout — The most important content is put either at the top or the left of a
visualization, as users move right and down for more specific content.
l White space — Using negative space (blank spots) and padding to delineate sections of
your visualization – don’t use thick “grid lines” as you would see in a table.
l Size — More important pieces of content (KPIs, summary visualizations, etc.) should be lar-
ger than other items.
l Device type — With device-specific dashboards you can create the optimum viewing exper-
ience on desktop, laptop, tablet, and phone.

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Color
Color is one of the most powerful aesthetic features because it’s an attention-grabber. It’s the
first thing we notice, and it can immediately highlight specific insights or identify outliers, but it is
not an unlimited design resource.

Using color effectively is critical for producing quality data visualizations – color types (alerting
vs highlighting), creating custom color palettes, and consistency—are key aspects to build into
your standards.

The correct use of color is critical for producing coherent and impactful data stories. The key
factors that should be taken in to consideration for any successful dashboard are:

l Managing color choices — The primary color(s) that make up most of your design should
be a neutral color. Using techniques like grayscale, you maximize the possibility for contrast
and visibility of your data driven points. Your extended colors—accents, emphasis, and
alerts—should reflect the brand. Any extended color should be used sparingly to draw atten-
tion to key messages within the data.
l Color types — Understand when to use sequential, diverging, categorical, highlighting, or
alerting color motifs.
l Custom color palettes — Build your own company palettes to bring a sense of uniformity
and provide guiderails for new users.
l Consistency — Double-check your visualizations to make sure a color (e.g. red) does not
mean three different things. Similar and repeated colors can imply a relation where one
doesn’t exist.
l Accessibility — Remember to account for color blindness in the design process.

Titles & Subtitles

Titles are an easy way to make your dashboard more digestible for your audience. You add
more context with subtitles that describe how to interact with the worksheet or dashboard. This
is a powerful and simple way to make dashboards easier to navigate. In the example below, the
question pulls the audience in and then tells the audience how to answer the question using the
dashboard.

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Effective Title and Subtitle

Similarly, by changing your filter title to something more intuitive, you guide viewers through
how to interact with a dashboard.

Example of a Filter

Tooltips
Tooltips guide the audience by highlighting important information. In the example below, the
County and State are highlighted through a bold effect and color change, and we don’t have to
partition our scatter plot further. We add important and related dimensions and measures in

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the tooltip. This helps save space and declutter the dashboard so our viewers can focus on
gleaning insights instead of interpreting the visualization.

Effective Tooltip

If the viewer notices something interesting in the tooltip, they can interact directly with the tooltip
and watch the rest of the visualization come to life, highlighting related marks and outliers.

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Formatting a Tooltip

Fonts
Typography is important. It can be tempting to use many font types and sizes in a dashboard.
Don’t do that; instead, define a clear hierarchy for your typography. In the example below,
there is a top, mid, and low-level font. The mid-level is blue to focus viewer attention. Color
draws the eye to the most important level (which needn’t necessarily be the top-level font).

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Top, Mid, and Low-Level Fonts (Courtesy of The Big Book of Dashboards)

Make sure that font selection is done to reinforce a visual hierarchy within your visualization
through size, boldness, color and type.

l Size — Larger elements convey importance as they catch the eye.  Save your largest fonts
for KPIs, titles, etc.
l Boldness — Bolder elements convey importance as they catch the eye. You can vary bold-
ness throughout your visualization in conjunction with size. For example, your title and KPIs
could both be 24pt font, but making your KPIs bold will “pop” them, allowing your audience
to focus there first.
l Color — Generally it’s good to stick with gray and black hues in your titles, text, and KPIs.
You can “pop” your KPIs by giving them a color treatment, but you have to balance this with
the other colors used in your visualization. Darker colors will draw the eye, so it’s wise to
lighten your titles so they don’t compete for visual attention.

Dashboard Size
By default, Tableau dashboards are set to use a fixed size. If you keep this setting, be sure to
construct your visualization at the size which it will be viewed. You can also set Size to
Automatic, so Tableau automatically adapts the overall dimensions of a visualization based on
screen size. This means that if you design a dashboard at 1300 x 700 pixels, Tableau will resize
it for smaller displays—and sometimes this results in scrunched views or scrollbars. The Range
sizing feature is helpful for avoiding this.

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Dashboard Size Range

If you're using Tableau Desktop to create dashboards, you can also design for specific device
layouts, so that on tablets, for example, your dashboard contains one set of views and objects,
and on phones it displays another. See Create Dashboard Layouts for Different Device Types
for steps.

Dashboard Interactivity
When designing a dashboard, you need to consider your audience, and how you can
communicate to them that they can interact with the dashboard. Skilled users know to click and
experiment, but new users may not have the knowledge or confidence. Your job is to help them
make these decisions consciously, not by accident.

It’s important to make any interactivity obvious to your audience—even by creating subtitles to
instruct them to click or hover for more information. Add interactivity to your data using filters,
tooltips, and actions. Filters are the most obvious way interact with a dashboard. Users can
also interact with your visualizations by selecting marks and hovering to see tooltips. The
actions you set up can respond with navigation and changes in the view. The table below
enumerates the ways to create interactivity in your dashboards.

Type Description

Highlighting & Highlight Actions l Easily find data of interest while remaining within con-
text.
l See other marks with shared attributes.

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Type Description

l Find related data across sheets.

Filtering & Filter Actions l Focus on data you want to analyze.

l Control context of data.
l Show relevant data and remove unnecessary data.

Parameters l Explore what-if scenarios.

l Customize your views.
l Enhance dashboard flexibility.

Sets & Set Actions l Dynamically update the members of a set.

l Compare parts to whole.
l Seamlessly drill down through hierarchies.
l Update a calculation by interacting with data.

Tooltips l Provide details on demand.

l Keep your dashboard minimalistic.
l Insert a viz in a tooltip.

URL Actions l Incorporate external content in a dashboard.

l Provide more in-depth information on demand.
l Link users to websites.

Dashboard Navigation l Guide users through your workbook.

l Direct users to additional content.

When designing dashboards, consider how and why you incorporate interactivity into the
dashboard. The following questions are helpful:

l Why does a viewer need to interact with the dashboard?

l What extras insight will be gained through the interactivity?

Designing for Performance

When we talk about performance, we mean the speed with which you can work in Tableau. That
might mean the speed of data analysis—for example, if you work in Tableau Desktop on a large
corporate database that takes forever in real time when you access it remotely. Or it might

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mean simply the speed of loading views or dashboards that you access on your desktop or
from Tableau Server.

Performance and efficiency should be treated as part of the design process—not as an

afterthought. Responsiveness is an important success factor for end users when viewing
reports and dashboards, so making your workbooks run as quickly as possible makes for
happier users.

There are several factors that make a workbook “efficient”. Some of these factors are technical
and some more user-focused but in general an efficient workbook is:

l Simple — Is it easy to create the workbook and will it be easy to maintain in the future?
Does it take advantage of the principles of visual analysis to clearly communicate the mes-
sage of the author and the data?
l Flexible — Can the workbook answer multiple questions the users want to ask, or just one?
Does it engage the user in an interactive experience or is it simply a static report?
l Fast — Does the workbook respond quickly enough for the users? This may mean time to
open, time to refresh, or time to respond to interaction. This is a subjective measure, but in
general we want workbooks to provide an initial display of information and to respond to
user interactions within seconds.

The performance of a dashboard is impacted by the following:

l The visual design at both the dashboard and worksheet levels, e.g. how many elements,
how many data points, use of filters and actions, etc.
l The calculations, e.g. what kind of calculation, where the calculation is performed, etc.
l The queries, e.g. how much data is returned, impact of custom SQL, etc.
l The data connections and underlying data sources.
l Some differences between Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server.
l Other environmental factors, such as hardware configuration and capacity.

For more information, see Designing Efficient Workbooks.

Accessibility
To make your views accessible to as many people as possible—or if you work in an
environment that is subject to US Section 508 requirements or other accessibility-related laws
and regulations—you can use Tableau to build data views that conform to the Web Content
Accessibility guidelines (WCAG 2.0 AA). This includes building views that are accessible to
users who use screen readers, braille keyboards, keyboard-only navigation, and so on. For
more information, see Build Data Views for Accessibility.

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Organizational Assets
Developing organizational assets—such as a style guide, template workbooks with pre-
selected fonts, colors, negative space, etc.—will help your users adopt visualization best
practices. It’s important for creators and viewers to both understand what “great” looks like and
have a common reference on how to best develop, deliver, and consume content. Your
community leaders should work on socializing great content across the organization and share
any assets on your Tableau Enablement Intranet on page 173.

By providing users with content that looks and feels familiar, you can dramatically speed up
adoption. Additionally, you can build consumer confidence by producing content that is
recognizable as part of a brand. The core themes to keep in mind when designing your
standard are text, color and consistency.

l Text — Use of text is not limited to custom fonts; it is also about the use of text and lettering
to enhance your analytics and storytelling to improve cognitive recognition of analytics.
l Color — Use custom color palettes, and capitalize on pre-existing associations to increase
speed to insight. In addition, keep in mind best practices regarding color-blindness and limit
the amount of discrete colors on a dashboard. If your brand has bright colors, use a neutral
color palette and use your brand’s colors to call out specific items on a dashboard instead of
using them for main colors.
l Consistency — Consistency doesn’t mean having to have a set of identical visualizations or
dashboards. Think about how to convey the same look and feel while allow room for design
and creativity.

Before creating your corporate-branded standard, remember that you should never
compromise efficient analytics for design or stylistic elements. While some design elements can
actually increase analytic value, you should never make something that looks good at the
expense of performance or functionality.

Visual Style Guide

Do your users know what a great dashboard looks like? By publishing a Visual Style Guide, you
will give your users a start on design, as well as guidance on how to differentiate between ad-
hoc and certified content, which fonts and brand colors to use, and formatting options. This style
guide can be a document or a Tableau workbook.

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Dashboard Layout Template

Dashboard layout templates help creators to assemble polished dashboards by adding their
individual sheets into predefined layout containers. You can download sample dashboard
layouts from Tableau Public and customize it with your own logo and colors.

Dashboard Layout

Dashboard Review Checklist

You would not distribute documents to stakeholders without the proper review, revision, and
release processes, and dashboards are no different. Dashboards need to be reviewed and
validated before they are promoted and certified.

The first person to validate content should be its author. Authors should solicit feedback from
the target audience as well. This can be done in an informal feedback group or by sharing a
link to the workbook and encouraging comments. No dashboard is right the first time. Time and
collaboration are ideal ways to hone in on the best representation of your data. Other people’s
opinions will bring fresh perspectives. Consider the following:

l What type of formal or informal means do we need to gather feedback?

l How can we encourage a constructive conversation?
l Has there been time spent on gathering feedback, improvement, and iteration?

Create a dashboard checklist to help users apply visual best practices and a consistent design
with a style guide. Every content creator should apply the checklist of your organizational
standards to their work before sharing it with others.

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Data Stewards should also play a role to ensure correctness and review an embedded data
source as a potential candidate for publishing and certifying. Beyond data and calculation
correctness, content validation should also include a review of the branding, layout, formatting,
performance, filters, dashboard actions, and edge case behaviors by the Site Administrator or
Project Leader site roles.

Metadata Checklist
The metadata checklist below shows best practices for curating a Published Data Source as
outlined in Tableau Governance on page 31. By establishing data standards using the
checklist, you’ll enable the business with governed self-service data access that is user-friendly
and easy to understand. Prior to creating an extract or Published Data Source in Tableau
Server, review and apply the following checklist to the metadata model:

n Filter and size to the analysis at hand

n Use standard, user-friendly naming conventions
n Add field synonyms for Ask Data
n Create hierarchies (drill paths)
n Set data types
n Apply formatting (dates, numbers)
n Set fiscal year start date, if applicable
n Add new calculations
n Remove duplicate or test calculations
n Enter field descriptions as comments
n Aggregate to highest level
n Hide unused fields

Presentation Guidelines
The last mile of analyzing data is taking insight and communicating it to others. Regardless of
the data skill level, people should be able to show a dashboard and clearly articulate a data-
driven message in a meeting or a presentation. Designing charts for presentation requires
special considerations because a complex chart that works for you on your laptop screen won’t
work in a presentation.

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When sharing some insight, consider the key purpose of the chart. What is the main message?
In the example below, the charts shows malaria cases in Zambia following work by global non-
profit organization, PATH. The key message is the 93% reduction in cases; notice how that is
stamped on the slide very clearly.

Stated Conclusion with Visualization

Think about how long the chart will be on the screen for. While you might intimately understand
the chart, your audience will be seeing it for the first time. If you want to show a complex chart,
you must spend the time explaining it. The malaria example above can be understood in
moments because of the visual and stated conclusion. A good rule of thumb is that a chart
should be understandable by your audience in less than half the time it is on the screen.

Your audience needs to be able to read the relevant parts of your chart. The font defaults to
very small fonts because they are designed for consumption on a laptop/monitor. These font
sizes don’t work on big screens. Two version of the same chart are shown below. The chart on
the right has fonts large enough to be read by everyone in the room.

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Legend Incorporated into Visualization

You should use color very wisely to highlight your message. Imagine you are tracking
customers by day of the week, and you want to highlight that weekends have far fewer
customers than weekdays. The chart on the left (below) most effectively convey that message.
It uses a simple color scheme to convey an insight much more clearly than the one on the right.

Color used for emphasis vs. too much color

Before you present your insights in charts, consider the following:

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l Have you added state conclusions to tell the story in the data?
l Can the fonts be read from the back of the room you will be presenting in?
l Is color used for highlighting your message rather than decoration?
l Is the chart simple enough to be understood during the time it will be on the screen?

The main takeaway is an appreciation that a dashboard or complex analytical chart, designed
for desktop screens are almost never the appropriate choice when sharing insights in
meetings or presentations.

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Tableau Communications
When you deploy Tableau broadly across your organization, establishing internal
communications and enablement resources promote adoption to scale data and analytics more
efficiently. Our most successful customers use a variety of self-service help methods to get
started with Tableau, answer frequently asked questions, and locate other Tableau users within
the company.

This topic outlines the enablement intranet, discussion forums, and newsletters to assist the
analytics sponsor and community leader. Depending on what works best for your company, the
list of topics below showcases the many ways you can communicate with your user community.
With a well-defined communications plan, you will build your user community, nurture the use of
data and analytics across all skill levels, and minimize the resources needed to answer common
questions.

Tableau Enablement Intranet

As your deployment grows from hundreds to thousands of users, it can be difficult for users to
connect with one another. The enablement intranet allows numerous users to connect across
departments and geographic locations. It will serve as the hub for all Tableau resources with the
goal of creating a consistent user experience and helping everyone form new habits based on
best practices.

The following sections define topics you can publish on your intranet that will allow your user
community to quickly and easily find information about onboarding, governance policies and
procedures, other Tableau users, and more. By sharing this information proactively, you’ll get
ahead of the questions and lower the barriers to providing governed, self-service analytics. An
example site map is shown below:

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Getting Started
When a new user is interested in a license, who do they contact? What do they need to know to
start using Tableau? What resources are available? As Tableau is deployed broadly across
your organization, if you’re the only one trying to onboard every user, there will be trouble
ahead. As more users adopt, it becomes more difficult to effectively manage and support the
user community because there aren’t enough resources to provide one-on-one assistance.

The “Getting Started” area connects new users with necessary resources on your intranet and
throughout the company. Get users over the hump, and onto using Tableau, instead of
struggling. This is the first step to empower users and build your organization’s Tableau
community.

Think of the common questions you might get:

l How do I obtain a license and install software or access Tableau Server?

l What are the basic skills for each license level? (detailed below)
l When is training and what is needed for my corresponding role?
l Who is using Tableau in my department?
l How do I connect to data?
l What certified data sources are available?

Additionally, publishing links to Tableau’s Online Help topics will help to set the baseline skills
for viewing and interacting with data:

l Sign in to Tableau Server or Tableau Online

l What can I do with a Tableau site?
l What can I do with a Tableau web view?

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l Explore and analyze data in a view

l Use custom views
l Share web views
l Subscribe to views
l Send data-driven alerts
l Comment on views

For Creators and Explorers, provide the following links:

l Web Authoring and Tableau Desktop Feature Comparison

l Creators: Get Started with Web Authoring
l Creators: Connect to data on the web
l Prepare Data on the Web
l Edit Views on the Web
l Connect to published data sources while web editing
l Create a Dashboard
l Create a Story
l Save your work

FAQ
Maintaining an FAQ will help users quickly and easily answer common questions, as well as
save you time from not having to directly respond to every question.

Support
In the support area, define where a user should go for assistance, including peer-to-peer
assistance, office hours, and logging a support ticket. If a user cannot find the help they need,
then they are more likely to become frustrated with the situation and not continue using
Tableau. Establish and document an escalation path for tickets in case a question cannot be
answered by an expert within the user’s team or department. For more information, see
Tableau Support Processes on page 191.

You should also take advantage of Tableau’s online Help and Knowledge Base by publishing
links to common help support topics: Tableau Desktop and Tableau Prep Builder. On these

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pages, you’ll find a list of popular topics that you can curate on your enablement intranet’s
support page.

Announcements
Post announcements on the enablement intranet to communicate everything from user group
meetings, learning plans, training opportunities, and office hours to maintenance windows,
upgrades, and other service-impacting events.

User Directory
Creating a user directory makes people discoverable, promotes the exchange of ideas, helps
users find others in or outside of their team for assistance, and builds your user community.
The user directory should include every licensed Tableau user, with their name, department,
title, license level, skill belt level, and certification level.

Licensed Tableau users can be obtained from the Tableau Server Community TS Users Data
Source and joined with HR, training, and certification data to provide a complete profile of each
user. Alternatively, the Tableau Users on page 17 tab of the Tableau Blueprint Planner will
also include this information and can be used as the data source to create the list. Use Tableau
to create the view and embed it in the web page.

Governance Models
Combining people, process, and technology, it is informed users who put your company’s
Tableau Governance Models on page 63 into practice. Help your users understand the
centralized, delegated, and self-governing models of data and content governance, which
were established with the Tableau Blueprint Planner’s Governance Worksheet, by publishing
guidelines, policies, and processes. Users need to understand and reference your
organization’s workflow regarding data source certification and content promotion for
everything from sandbox to production projects.

Data Platforms
Your company’s sources of data should be listed so that users know where to go for what kind
of data. Document the database name, table or view, type of authentication, and access
request requirements on each one.

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Certified Data Source Directory

To help users understand what trusted data is available to them and more quickly find a
governed dataset for their analysis, create a certified data source directory. The Certified Data
Source Directory lists curated, governed data sources. It should include the data source name,
owner, and source of data at a minimum. Since one department’s data can be helpful context
for another department, consider sharing all certified data source names to the directory to
increase awareness around availability while also minimizing the possibility of duplication.

Certified Data Sources can be obtained from the Tableau Server Community TS Data
Connections Data Source by filtering on [Data Source is Certified] = TRUE. Use Tableau to
create the view and embed it in the web page.

Analytics Best Practices

With analytics best practices readily available on the enablement intranet, content authors will
have guidelines for choosing the right chart type and creating effective, actionable dashboards
for content consumers. For more information, see Analytics Best Practices in Tableau on
page 147.

Visual Style Guide

Do your users know what a great dashboard looks like? By publishing a Visual Style Guide, you
will give your users a head start on design, as well as guidance on how to differentiate between
ad-hoc and certified content, which fonts and brand colors to use, and other formatting options.
Often the best place to start defining a visual style is your corporate brand or style guide. Post a
custom color palette and layout template in this area. For more information on branded layout
templates, see Analytics Best Practices in Tableau on page 147.

Inspiration
You can embed Tableau RSS and/or Twitter feeds in an intranet page to deliver current content
directly from Tableau to your user community. Tableau provides an RSS feed for the Tableau
Blog, which can be consumed with an RSS viewer web component. Separately, Tableau
provides an email subscription service for Tableau Public’s Viz of the Day Gallery. Tableau
(@tableau) and Tableau Public (@tableaupublic) Twitter feeds can be embedded on your
intranet by using Twitter’s embedding page.

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l Viz of the Day: Gallery,Email, Twitter

l Tableau Blog: Website, Email, RSS
l Tableau: Twitter
l Tableau Public: Twitter

For the latest and greatest content in data visualization, join the #datafam by following Zen
Masters and Ambassadors on twitter.

Events Calendar
Building an events calendar based on engagement activities outlined in Tableau Community
Engagement on page 183 and Tableau Support Processes on page 191 can assist your
users with engagement and adoption. These activities include user group meetings, admin
group meetings, lunch-and-learn events, and office hours.

Learning Plans
To help users understand the skills needed for their job function and license type, publish
learning plans for each of the roles: Site Admins, Project Leaders, Creators, Explorers, and
Viewers. For more information on learning plans, see Tableau Education on page 119.

Training Videos
All videos, transcripts, and related files may be downloaded in bulk and curated in your
organization’s learning management system (LMS) or published to your enablement intranet.
In-house trainers may supplement the free training materials offered by Tableau with their own
practice exercises or data sets relevant to your organization.

Company Education Calendar

The company education calendar has recurring meetings for Site Admin-, Project Leader-,
Creator-, Explorer-, and Viewer-focused training sessions that will be held in a web meeting or
a classroom. Holding these sessions monthly or even weekly, especially starting out, will
provide everyone with the information they need to begin using Tableau. For more
information, see Tableau Education on page 119.

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User Group Recordings

By recording your internal user group meetings, you can make them available to anyone who
was unable to attend in-person. They can serve as a useful reference for training new users as
well.

Tableau Blog and Newsletter

Publish an analytics blog to showcase achievements and provide awareness and recognition of
how data and analytics are used within your organization. Departments can submit highlights of
their work and upcoming events can be promoted. Other topics might include documented
value, Tableau tips and tricks, enterprise-scope data source availability, and communication of
downtime/upgrades. Alternatively, you can distribute an analytics newsletter via email.

Tableau Discussion Forums and Chat

Discussion forums and other chat-based communications provide users with information in real
time. These methods can also become a knowledge base as archived chats may answer
questions that will arise in the future. Set up a Tableau discussion forum, chat room, and/or
channel (Slack, Yammer, etc.) and invite all your Tableau users to join.

Depending on the systems used by your company, both discussion forums and chat are
incredibly helpful to community managers to determine topics that may need more attention in
training or with engagement activities. In forum-style discussions, questions and answers can
be categorized by topic to improve future searches. For channel-based communications, you
can achieve a similar result with a channel per topic or a single help channel for all questions.
Either way, facilitating these connections between users will make your community stronger.

Getting Started
Building your own community spaces can be challenging, but once started, it will serve as a
virtual rallying point for your users. The below methods can be used to help you set yourself up
for success:

l Community Champions: A committee or team of Tableau experts can be a voice for your
users and shape the way your forums are setup based on their needs. Keeping this
group diverse will ensure you plan for the needs of all your users.

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l Types of Resources: Which topics are most important to your users? How do they prefer
to consumer content? What is the frequency at which you should deliver content?
Answer these questions can get you started on creating content that is right for your
user base. Your community champions should be involved in this planning phase.
l Encourage self-service help: A key benefit of community spaces is the ability for users to
solve their own problems and issues through the expertise of others. By setting service
level agreements on response times to chat messages or posts you can give your com-
munity users confidence that they will not go unheard.
l Roles & Responsibilities: A successful community can quickly grow to touch all aspects
of an organization. Make sure the roles of the team who will be managing your internal
forums are clearly defined. Examples of discussion forum and chat roles are:
l Admins: monitoring the overall health & performance of the forums

l Moderators: answering questions and engaging with forum users

lAmbassadors: those who serve as champions and face of the forums

l Be Realistic: Set expectations for your forums early in terms of engagement, what types
of content you will need, and who owns what.
l Start Small: Build for what you need and plan for the future. Your forums may start small,
but they won’t stay that way.

Building Your Forum

When setting up your own forums and chat spaces, keep in mind some of the below best
practices:

l Platform: Look to company standards for chat- and intranet-based applications that
work within your organization. This can be anything from your Tableau Enablement
Intranet on page 173 to a chat-based application. The important thing is that your users
know where to go to connect with other Tableau users, outside of regular Internal
Tableau Activities on page 183.
l Easy to find resources: Create distinct spaces for your users to quickly find resources
such as getting started with Tableau, advanced calculations, and employees who can
offer guidance. Setting these spaces up early and populating them with content will keep
your users coming back to your internal spaces.
l Categorization: Setup chat channels or tag forum posts with specific topics to improve
content searchability. As your community grows, so will the content. Make sure your
users can quickly and easily find what they need.
l Internal Moderators: Identify a group of power users who can help moderate the forums
by answering questions, creating content, and onboarding new users. These individuals

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should also be Tableau experts who can help guide your users through even the most
challenging asks.
l Use the data: Keep track of how users are interacting with the forums and what topics are
most popular. This will guide you in developing the right content and forum engagement
plans for your users, as well as identify content for regular Internal Tableau Activities
on page 183.

Through careful planning, your discussion forums and chat spaces can become a tremendous
resource for driving adoption of Tableau within your organization.

Learn from Tableau

Leverage the Tableau Forum resources below for inspiration on how you want users to interact
with your forums and the types of guides you can create:

l Tableau Forum Guidelines

l Attaching a workbook
l @ mention etiquette
l Community Etiquette
l Code of Conduct

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Tableau Community Engagement

Your organization’s Tableau user community is just like the Tableau Community—only on a
smaller scale. You should connect users within your company and generate enthusiasm among
a group of people founded on the common cause of putting data at the center of every
conversation. While building excitement around the use of Tableau, engagement activities
accelerate and reinforce the vision for modern analytics, and ultimately, fuel your organizational
transformation.

Engagement activities are used to create and nurture an environment for more productive,
results-driven people who will use facts over intuition to make business decisions. People will
collaborate with each other and share their product knowledge and business domain
experience across a wide-range of skill levels and across different teams and departments, who
may never have exchanged ideas before.

Engagement activities should include something for everyone, offering a variety of activities that
appeal to different skill sets and are delivered through different formats from in-person to
virtual, both inside and outside your company. Whether hosted by your company’s community
leader, other Tableau customers, or Tableau Zen Masters and Ambassadors, there are a
variety of formats to invite users to learn, collaborate, and network to increase their Tableau
skills.

Internal Tableau Activities

Hosted within your company, internal engagement activities are organized by a Community
Leader, following a regular schedule or events calendar that is published on your enablement
intranet or wiki and promoted through other communication channels. The following activities
will be covered in this section:

l User Group – open to all Tableau users to promote collaboration and sharing between
teams
l Champions Group – open to all identified champions to exchange ideas
l Admin Group – open to all Tableau Server and Site administrators to review server and con-
tent usage and exchange administration ideas
l Lunch & Learn – lunchtime meetings focused on building a new skill
l Viz Games – data-analysis competition

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l Tableau Day – full- or half-day event to share Tableau successes

l Analytics Day – similar to Tableau Day, but broadened to include other technologies

Tableau User Group

Internal user groups can take different shapes depending on your organization’s size and
geographical distribution, but one thing is certain—every Tableau user is invited to participate.
This also includes Server and Site Administrators. It may start with just a few people, or it could
be hundreds across the organization. During user group meetings, people can openly share
information across different teams and departments. Regardless of skill level, it’s a great way
for everyone who attends to learn, network with other users, and exchange fresh perspectives
on solving business problems with data.

A strong internal user group starts with a strong leader. It is their passion and attention that will
fuel and inspire the rest of the group. The community leader should schedule a regular,
recurring monthly meeting time, and promote it on the enablement intranet. Don’t be
discouraged if attendance numbers aren’t high initially. When relevant topics are put on the
agenda, people will attend because they know valuable information will be shared. If possible,
record the meetings and archive presentations on the enablement intranet so that new users
can benefit from on-demand viewing. A sample user group agenda is shown below:

Topic Description Duration

Welcome/announcements Welcome attendees and share announcements 10 min

such as new help topics on the intranet, training
sessions, etc.

Skill development Select a topic to help attendees learn a new skill, 15 min
such as product skills or demonstrate design best
practices from internal or Tableau Public content.

Success story Share an achievement that was made by using data. 10 min

New certified data sources Highlight new certified data sources that have 5 min
become available because one department’s data
can add context to another’s.

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Topic Description Duration

Top content recognition Showcase the top 10 dashboards in the company. 5 min

Open feedback Allow time for open feedback and Q&A. 15 min

Total 60 min

Meeting topics should be tailored to suit users’ needs. Information gathered from the Data &
Analytics Survey and Users tabs in the Tableau Blueprint Planner will provide initial guidance on
what skills exist versus which skills need to be developed among the user community.

For existing deployments, Tableau Server and/or Site Administrators will be able to provide
more information about user behaviors from the Tableau Server Repository, such as content
utilization and the availability and use of published and certified data sources, subscriptions,
and data-driven alerts, as outlined in Tableau Monitoring on page 97 and Measurement of
Tableau User Engagement and Adoption on page 135. As an example, if there are only a
few Certified Data Sources available, you can hold a session on how to publish and certify data
sources and discuss the value of the curated, governed data models. Similarly, if users are not
subscribing to dashboards or setting data-driven alerts, you can encourage users to take
advantage of these features by explaining how to subscribe or set an alert. For more
information, see Tableau Community Toolkit.

Tableau Champions Group

Champions are part of a program to recognize people in your analytics community who heavily
contribute by connecting, collaborating, and sharing with others because they recognize the
value of helping their peers see and understand data. Characteristics of a champion are listed
below:

l Leadership and Evangelism

l Represents the spirit and voice of the community: inclusive and kind.
l Teaches by their actions and encourages good behavior within the community.

l Knowledge and Advocacy

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l Has a fair understanding of the Tableau product, company, and/or community.

l Is active in the community.

l Responsiveand Accessible to others in the community

l Responds and engages with others regularly in regards to Tableau.

l Collaborates and contributes where possible.

Champions should meet as a group to share what they are hearing and seeing from users to
feed into community-wide, enablement activities, representing the Tableau community within
your organization.

Tableau Admin Group

The admin group is a subset of the user group, consisting of Tableau Server and Site
Administrators only. Admin group meetings should occur monthly to exchange ideas, share
challenges, and identify how changes will be communicated. In organizations with multiple
Tableau Server instances, having a Tableau Server Admin group will help to coordinate
standards and upgrades, as well as tackle common challenges. A sample administrator group
agenda is shown below:

Topic Description Duration

Welcome/announcements Welcome the admins and share announcements. 10 min

Server Utilization Review Review server hardware utilization, background 15 min

tasks, user onboarding schedule.

Content Utilization Review Review content utilization, slow-loading dashboards, 20 min

long-running extracts, stale content.

Open feedback Allow time for open feedback and Q&A. 15 min

Total 60 min

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Tableau Lunch & Learn

It’s often challenging to schedule time during a busy workday, but everyone has to eat. Lunch-
and-learn events are an informal option to help users learn from each other. Schedule a
monthly, lunchtime meeting where people can bring their food in and listen, or if possible, even
arrange for food to be brought in. This will definitely increase your attendance rate.

Tableau Viz Games

Viz Games is a visualization competition where a sponsor issues a visualization challenge, a
data set prepared for analysis, and a deadline for publishing submissions, typically one week or
more into the future. Live contests, where contestants compete in a race to submit
visualizations before the clock runs out, are exciting, but more complicated to run. At Tableau,
both formats are used. The online contests determine who is eligible to compete in the final, in-
person contest.

Selecting a theme up front helps guide the rest of the competition. Themes for viz competitions
are typically around a particular topic, dataset, chart/dashboard type, or feature. Get creative
and challenge the participants in a way that is fun and engaging!

Executive sponsors may tie the contest back to a strategic initiative to motivate contestants
around a common cause or business problem. Allow cross-functional teams to form and solve
the problem by bringing together a Tableau champion, a data expert, and a business domain
expert. For example, the company has a $45 million savings target. Finance provides Accounts
Payable data and contests are asked to design a dashboard to identify potential savings areas.

Judging panels can be a group of people with diverse experiences and perspectives to make for
a balanced evaluation. The panel should evaluate submissions on the following areas:

l Analysis – Review the question(s) that are being asked and the insights the viz provides. In
more detail, look at the type of data used, the type of charts used, the type of aggregation
and statistical analysis used. How sophisticated and appropriate for the story, or question
being answered, are these analyses?
l Storytelling – See whether the context of the topic and questions being posed are clear. Is it
clear how one moves through the viz and from question to answer? Does it highlight what is
interesting and why it matters? All of that can be done in different ways, using col-
or/shape/size, text, images, annotations, story points, etc.
l Design – Evaluate the visual appeal, layout and flow, use of whitespace (or lack thereof),
and colors and images. How polished is it? How appropriate is the design for the story that
is being told?

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Use a scoring sheet to record values and feedback:

Viz and Link Analysis (0-10) Storytelling (0-10) Design (0-10) Feedback

Recognition, no matter how small, is motivating. Give out prizes for simplicity, for guided
analytics, for creativity, and even for obscure insight. For more information, see Tableau
Community Toolkit.

Tableau Day
To raise the visibility of data and analytics within your company, schedule a Tableau Day one
or two times a year. The event can be like a miniature Tableau Conference for your company
where presenters share their work and insights. Coordination with executive sponsors and
achievements made on strategic initiatives are a great way to emphasize the transformational
power of data and analytics.

Tableau can provide speakers who lead the attendees through demos, hands-on training, and
Q&A. Having a Tableau resource onsite—or more than one—is a guaranteed way to attract
other users. Working with your Tableau account manager to set up a Tableau Day is a
fantastic method to generate excitement and build momentum across the organization.

Analytics Day
An Analytics Day is similar to a Tableau Day, but the scope expands to include subjects other
than Tableau. Expanded topics like systems modernization and database platforms can be
combined with Tableau content for a broader showcase of the use of analytics and advances
being made with data.

External Tableau Activities

External activities, outside your company, are organized by Tableau or Tableau Community
leaders. You should encourage users to attend these activities as well. For a full list of
scheduled community events, visit Events and Conferences. The following external activities
are covered in this section:

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l Area Tableau User Group – customer-led sessions held in major cities around the world
l Virtual Tableau User Group – online meetings hosted by customers or Tableau
l Tableau Public Virtual Challenges – community-led programs with a skill-building focus
l Tableau Community Forums – places to join discussions, browse topics, ask questions, and
share insights
l Tableau Roadshows – Tableau-hosted events in coordination with product launches
l Tableau Conference – annual customer conference held in both the US and Europe
l Iron Viz - Tableau’s annual data visualization contest

Area Tableau User Group

A Tableau User Group is a customer-organized event that creates a place for users to learn,
collaborate, and network. With over 250 worldwide, Tableau User Groups are organized by
geographical regions and are most commonly held at office spaces or universities. Hosting a
Tableau User Group is beneficial to both the host and attendees—it’s free onsite training for
employees and great exposure for creating visibility in the community!

Virtual Tableau User Group

Industry user groups are often run by customers. Here, more people are able to connect with
their peers in 14 active industry groups: Server Admin, Healthcare, Government, K-12, Law,
Retail, Data + Women, Nonprofit, Insurance, Higher Education, OEM Partners, Travel &
Hospitality, Manufacturing, and Loss Prevention.

Tableau Public Virtual Challenges

Run by Tableau Community Leaders and Zen Masters, Tableau Community-hosted events
inspire others, demonstrate different ways to solve problems, and offer different perspectives
for applying Tableau. This is in no way meant to be an exhaustive list.

Makeover Monday helps you improve your data visualization and analysis skills by exploring
different perspectives and approaches to a data visualization. With participants from around the
world, Makeover Monday is a weekly learning and development session hosted by Tableau
Community Leaders and Zen Masters. Every Monday, participants start with a given data set
and create better, more effective visualizations. Consider time-boxing yourself to one hour, just
to make something quick.

Workout Wednesday will help you grow your Tableau skills by testing your knowledge of
Tableau. Participants in these weekly challenges are asked to replicate the challenge as closely

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as possible. When you think you have it, leave a comment with a link to your visualization, and
post a pic on Twitter for others to enjoy. You should aim to complete challenges within one
hour, and solutions are provided for all challenges if you get stuck.

For more information and a more extensive list of Tableau Community-hosted virtual
challenges, check out Tableau Public’s Community Resources page.

Tableau Community Forums

Find answers and help others, connect with other users, add your voice to future Tableau
product releases. Browse topics, ask questions, and share your insights. For more
information, see Tableau Forum Guidelines.

Tableau Conferences
Customers come to Tableau Conferences to learn how to be faster, gain inspiration, network
with other attendees, and build lasting connections. Whether you’re new to data analytics or a
seasoned pro, Tableau Conference has the content you need to kick your skills into high gear.
From lectures and hands-on training to collaboration sessions and meetups, Tableau
Conference has something for every learning style, including Tableau- and customer-led
breakout sessions, training workshops, and certifications. The events are held in the US
(Tableau Conference) and Europe (Tableau Conference Europe) annually.

Iron Viz Competition

Iron Viz is Tableau’s own data visualization contest, giving you the opportunity to compete with
data rockstars from around the world. The winners of a series of topic-themed virtual qualifier
competitions determine the finalists who advance to a live on-stage championship at either
Tableau Conference Europe or Tableau Conference. Find out about the schedule and more
here.

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Tableau Support Processes

In addition to the proactive steps you’ve taken with self-service help resources and education
initiatives published on your enablement intratnet, your user community should be able to
request more support in case these two approaches do not answer their question or resolve the
issue. If a user cannot find the help they need, then they are more likely to become frustrated
and abandon Tableau, which will negatively impact adoption targets.

Like other enterprise platforms, you should define the support escalation path for Tableau,
considering the next levels of support that will be available and which team will be responsible
for the resolution. Customers have successfully established community-led support by using
champion-created content, and escalating to the analytics or IT team for system-level issues,
such as server and database access. Log and categorize these requests to analyze the support
data and identify opportunity areas for new content on the enablement intranet, user group
topics, and educational needs. Additionally, there are a number of self-help resources are
provided by Tableau:

l Knowledge base with step-by-step instructions to resolve problems

l Tableau Community forums to find answers from other Tableau users worldwide
l Support hub with alerts, drivers, release notes, known issues, and FAQs
l Tableau Trust for status of the Tableau Online and Tableau Public
l Twitter support with updates trending technical support issues, popular KB articles, and
more

Through a variety of interactions, you need to support your user community, encourage
collaboration, and remove the obstacles to using data and analytics effectively. This document
outlines the tactics to develop Tableau champions, connect people with peer-to-peer
assistance, and define the support escalation path.

Tableau Champion Development

Residing within each team or department, champions see the transformational value of
Tableau and possess the skills necessary to maximize the impact of data and analytics using
visual best practices in their business domain. Initially, this starts with the content creators who
are part of the project team, but as the deployment expands to new departments and teams,
new champions will need to be developed to scale your analytics practice.

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Champions are a key part of the adoption process because they reduce the dependency on a
centralized support team. They will connect users who are analyzing similar data and identify
cross-functional collaboration opportunities across the organization. By involving champions in
new user onboarding within their department or team, champions will help to orient those who
are new to Tableau and promote the use of data and analytics for making business decisions.
Being on the front lines of applying Tableau to make data-driven decisions, champions will
provide valuable input to community communications and engagement activities to optimize
your organization’s analytics practice.

Because champions will be recognized as experts, you should prioritize and invest in
developing their skills prior to beginning a company-wide, education initiative and support their
continued learning. Depending on the size of your user community and the bench strength for
analytical skills, you will choose an approach that’s appropriate for your organizational needs.
Ensure you are clear on the scope and responsibilities needed to fulfill the role, obtain
management approval for the time champions are committing, and recognize and reward their
contributions to support others. Two examples are detailed below:

l Department/Team Tableau Champions – Champions are identified within depart-

ments or teams and functional or geographic areas. They will have both Tableau and
business domain data expertise to help others institutionalize analytics best practices
as outlined in Analytics Best Practices in Tableau on page 147. They should also
review user engagement with the Site Administrator as defined in Measurement of
Tableau User Engagement and Adoption on page 135 to quantify the impact of
their contributions.
l Tableau Community Champions – Champions are identified across the user com-
munity for the value they add to the community through sharing best practices, helping
new users, and assisting users create or make over their dashboards. They should
assist the community leader with coordination of relevant communications and engage-
ment activities as outlined in Tableau Communications on page 173 and Tableau
Community Engagement on page 183.

Peer-to-Peer Assistance
With peer-to-peer assistance, you encourage others to share and transfer their Tableau
knowledge. This allows your user community to leverage the collective brainpower of the entire
organization. This section outlines Data Doctor, mentoring, and discussion forums and chat.

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Tableau Data Doctor

The Data Doctor toolkit is a collection of resources to organize and host your own help sessions
where members of your analytics team and/or champions assist other Tableau users. Data
Doctor fosters engagement and enablement by connecting your Tableau experts with their
colleagues who have questions or need help using Tableau in live, one-on-one sessions.
Organizations have used Data Doctor to provide peer-to-peer support and training, as well as
identify individual, departmental, or organizational knowledge gaps within their organization.
For more information, see Tableau Community Toolkit.

Mentoring
With mentoring, experienced Tableau users share their knowledge with others. Champions
should take a lead role in onboarding within their teams or departments by mentoring new
Tableau users, introducing available data sources, and providing informal check-ins to grow the
analytical skills of their team members. Using data from Measurement of Tableau User
Engagement and Adoption on page 135, champions can partner with Server or Site
Administrators to see which users are creating and consuming content and determine who
might need more encouragement.

Tableau Discussion Forums & Chat

Discussion forums and other chat-based communications can provide users with information in
real time. These methods can also become a knowledge base as archived chats can answer
questions that will arise in the future. Set up a Tableau discussion forum, chat room, and/or
channel (Slack, Yammer, HipChat), and invite all your Tableau users to join.

External Tableau Community Forum

The Tableau Community forums are a source of information to answer Tableau-related
questions. Chances are that if users have a question, someone else has asked it in the past, or
will have the same issue in the future. This community of Tableau users learn, teach, and share
ideas with each other so that the knowledge within it is continually growing.

To get started, review the Tableau Forum Guidelines and Packaged workbooks: when, why,
how. Visit this page to create your Tableau account and get started.

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