Tableau Server & Cloud Admin User Group 12 Aug 2026

0:00 Kevin O'Donovan: Welcome, everyone, uh, back to the Tableau Server, Tableau Cloud TUG, Tableau User Group.

0:07 Um, you're joined today by Kevin O'Donovan, me, and Brad Fair.

0:11 Um, between the two of us, uh, I'd be hard-pressed to think you could stump us, uh, 'cause when I get stumped I go to Brad, and I'll get stumped often.

0:22 But thank you all for coming. Um, accidental admin, um, Brad said this, you probably heard it, um, and it sorta is how my career started in Tableau Server.

0:32 Um, they said, "Do you know Tableau?" I said, "Nope." Um, and they said, "Do you wanna learn?" I said, "Yeah, sure. I'm good at, good at software." I was young back then in 2012.

0:44 Um, so I'll start with my intro. Uh, Kevin O'Donovan, uh, senior solution, uh, architect at Slalom.

0:51 Should be, uh, senior, uh, anyway, uh, senior consultant actually.

0:56 Um, but my past is in 2012, got introduced to Tableau Server at General Motors, um, and was part of the effort to in-house that application. General Motors was going through an in-housing of IT, uh, at that time, so they were taking everything out of the consultants' hands and putting it back in the hands of, um, the company. Um, and that's where I learned, I think on Tableau Server 7 or 9, I can't remember specifically.

1:23 Um, and then did seven years there and had an opportunity to go to Indeed and build them out a global deployment of Tableau Server.

1:30 Uh, they were running on a single VM.

1:32 Took that to physical hardware on Windows boxes and then went to AWS and Linux, uh, for a full cloud, uh, global d- uh, solution. Uh, then moved into the… I, I joke I had done everything with Tableau Server, so then I got into the consulting realm of doing Tableau Cloud migrations. I did that at XeoMatrix and now do that here at Slalom also. And Brad, I'll give you a chance to say your bio.

1:58 Brad Fair: Sure. So I'm, I'm Brad Fair. I've been working with Tableau, specifically Tableau Server, since 2009.

2:05 And, um, that's been long enough now that I don't even remember what version it's on. I'd have to go look it up, like what, what version that was on when I first started working with it.

2:17 Um, but I've, I've taught Tableau Server classes since, I think before Tableau even had Tableau Server classes. And, um, am, am really excited about all things Tableau Server, Tableau Cloud, and, you know, the analytical infrastructure. So it's, it's my full-time job, much like it's Kevin's.

2:38 Um, though we, we work for different companies, we do collaborate quite a bit. So, uh, ex- excited for this presentation. Thanks, Kevin.

2:48 Kevin O'Donovan: Thank you, Brad.

2:49 Um, so just today's agenda.

2:53 Um, what, you know, we're gonna go through what is an admin, Tableau Server versus Tableau Cloud, uh, some of the nuances there, uh, what navigation is, uh, like or as an admin.

3:04 Um, go through some navigation familiarity of, um, the application, like favorites, shared with me, personal spaces.

3:11 Um, move on to users, groups, schedules, um, and tasks.

3:17 Um, and we'll sort of polish off with site status, system health, and reports that come built into Tableau Server and Cloud, and settings, and hopefully leave some time for some questions and answers. Uh, yeah. What is the admin role?

3:33 Brad Fair: Hey, Kevin.

3:34 Kevin O'Donovan: Yes sir, yes sir.

3:35 Brad Fair: Uh, there was some feedback saying you're a bit hard to hear, and that's true. I've already turned my sound up a little bit.

3:41 Kevin O'Donovan: Oh.

3:41 Brad Fair: Uh, I thought it was just me, but-

3:43 Kevin O'Donovan: Oh, you know what it is. I bet, bet.

3:46 Better, better. Tested.

3:47 Brad Fair: Wow, that's way better. Thank you.

3:50 Kevin O'Donovan: Okay. Well, I'll troubleshoot that later. Thank you.

3:53 All right. Um, yeah. Um, sorry about that. Um, so let me go back here.

4:01 Uh, just an overview. What is an admin? Tableau Server versus Cloud. Navigation as an admin.

4:06 Favorites, uh, shared with me, personal spaces we're gonna cover. Users, groups, schedules, and jobs and tasks. That's probably more of what an admin will see. Site status, system health, reports that are built into Tableau Server, Tableau Cloud, settings, and some time for Q&A.

4:20 Sorry about the audio, everyone.

4:23 Um, so let's start off with what i- uh, the admin role. What is a, an admin?

4:28 Um, system administrator is the person responsible for the upkeep, uh, and configuration, the reliability of the system. Um, so you know, you're, it, if you're a Tableau Server, you are responsible, um, I, I was responsible for the actual infrastructure underneath, um, the integrations, you know, um, IdPs, um, Active Directory, everything else that touched the system, uh, along with updating, patching, uh, and troubleshooting, uh, and opening tickets with, uh, support when needed.

4:59 In Tableau S- uh, in Tableau Cloud and Server, what it really is, is it's a role with elevated permissions. Um, and a site can have, uh, one admin or many. Um,

5:14 yes, and, uh, most admins do get the role, inherit the role without asking.

5:21 So, uh, the three levels of Tableau Server admin. Um, there's a system admin. That's gonna be more of your Tableau Server. Um, you're gonna actually have actual access to the boxes, VMs, um, that the software runs on.

5:35 Uh, you're gonna be doing the drivers installs, the patching, uh, multi-node configurations, things there.

5:41 Um, that's the system admin part of that piece. Um, the server admin part of Tableau Server is pretty close to Cloud.

5:48 Um, you're gonna create sites, you're gonna manage schedules, notifications, dealing with users, groups, and things like that.

5:56 Uh, and then site admin is, uh, still an administrator, but if you're running, uh, multiple sites or if you're in Tableau Cloud, uh, that's, um, that is a permission that you get to manage a site which is just a portion of Tableau. Um, Tableau Server can have multiple sites. Tableau Cloud can have multiple sites.

6:14 Um, a site admin would just be an admin for that site or several sites.

6:23 Um, yeah, and this is sort of a breakup of the difference, um, Tableau Server administrator, site administrator, that's what you get on Tableau Server.

6:32 You're maintaining everything and all the settings. Um, you're running the whole show.

6:37 Um, Tableau Cloud, you know, that's you, you pay for Tableau Cloud. They run all the hardware, the up- updates, and, you know, um, keep the system up and running.

6:47 Uh, and the, the, uh, roles that you'll have there is a cloud administrator.

6:52 I think that used to be a cloud manager or permission or something like that, and then a site administrator.

6:58 Um, the cloud administrator, that's where you create your sites. Um, you can do your private, uh, connect with AWS, um, and some other, uh, specific things, uh, that your sites will– that all your sites will use or get managed by. And your site administrator, that's sort of where your day-to-day is gonna happen. That's where your content's published, your workbooks, your data sources, users and groups, and things like that.

7:20 Um, yeah, as you can see, uh, no infrastructure and, um, infrastructure, uh, for Tableau Server.

7:33 Yeah, yeah, you can have up to fifty sites on cloud so far. I don't know if they've expanded that. So let's get into some navigation here.

7:40 Um, navigation, um, if you are a user of Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud, um, the navigation i-is the same. I mean, nothing much changes, so you just have some more options to go through.

7:53 Um, so for admins, we really what we do is on the, our our left-hand side, uh, you'll see, uh, additional options. Standard sections are, you know, Home, Favorites, your Recents, Shared With Me, Personal Space.

8:07 Um, the admin sections are gonna be Users, Groups, Schedules, Jobs, Tasks, things like that, and also, uh, Site Status and Settings. Um, I think I always logged into Tableau Server and hit Site Status, like, every morning when I was a Tableau Server admin. That was my first stop.

8:25 Um, and it– you can see it just gives you a bar on the left-hand side, um, that it will change it as or give you the additional options.

8:38 Um, and then the other big part, uh, part that I think gets overlooked by a lot of people, uh, even me at one point, is the profile icon in the top right.

8:48 Um, yeah, site status, disk space. Yeah, absolutely.

8:53 Been there. Uh, the profile menu in the top right, uh, exactly is, um, uh, a section that it gets overlooked. Um, you have some shortcuts to your personal, personal space, My Content, um, Set a Start Page. I never really use that. Um, but really the big important one for me was the My Accounts settings piece.

9:15 Um, and if you go in the account settings section, it's actually, uh, it's pretty informative.

9:24 Uh, you know, shows your name, shows your username, your site role, um, your last login time.

9:29 Um, but you also have tabs for your content, your custom alerts, uh, your alerts and your custom views, subscriptions, um, and then the biggest one, uh, this is where they hide your saved credentials, or I should say this is where your saved credentials, um, are saved, uh, which is pretty big for, um, some databa-databases like Snowflake and such like that, um, and like OneDrive and many others.

9:57 I think you can see here Intuit, ServiceNow, such like that.

10:02 And you have a nice little button there that you can actually, um, clear all the saved credentials too.

10:10 And this is, um, gonna be pretty standard, I believe, for most users, uh, but admins do get it too. Um, Favorites, um, pretty self-explanatory, but, uh, works just like a browser bookmarks.

10:24 Um, every, uh, I think every workbook has a star next to it, so you can just click, click on the star, and that adds it to your favorites. And then you can just pop into your favorites area and see everything that you favorited. Um, you know, if you're not going to your site status to check your server uptime or your server status and your disk space, uh, you might wanna pop into your favorited, uh, workbook.

10:48 Uh, Shared With Me, uh, was pretty, very useful.

10:53 Uh, you know, I'd always have something emailed with to me, shared actually with me, um, and I'd struggle to like find where that email was, the Slack message, such like that.

11:04 Uh, if it's been shared with you through the system, through Tableau, Tableau keeps track of that in the Shared With Me section, so you could click on that, and you will actually see everything that, uh, someone has sent to you or shared with you in Tableau.

11:16 Uh, and then Personal Space, um, I loved this when this feature came out.

11:21 Uh, it's a private area for users to actually publish things and sort of develop on Tableau Server, Tableau Cloud.

11:28 Um, no one else can see it.

11:32 Asterisk, uh, admins can see in just personal spaces. Um, but what it gives for a lot of my developers was, uh, they always had this, uh, piece, "Hey, I'm gonna go present this," or, "This is gonna get released to an executive or to my leadership. I wanna make sure when I put this up from Tableau Desktop to Tableau Cloud to Tableau Server it looks the same, it navigates right.

11:55 Uh, I can test out screen resolutions, browsers," stuff like that.

11:59 Um, they no longer had to ask me for a spot to put that in. Uh, they could put it in personal spaces. No one get access to it. Um, wasn't being able to share it out or anything else like that, so a really safe place to develop in the web or even, you know, uh, test out your, your content.

12:21 And yeah, let's get into a little bit more about, you know, what are some of the areas that a Tableau Server, uh, you know, site role will give you, and that would be users, jobs, and status.

12:37 Um, so when you go to the user section, I've filtered this out so you don't see all my users on my environment. But, uh, you have a nice little filter option there at number three, pops out, and you can, you know, filter by site role or by keyword search. So I just search my name.

12:56 Uh, there's more than one Kevin at my company, so I had to add in my last initial there. Uh, and it brings up my, um, my username and site role.

13:06 Also brings in the last time I signed in.

13:08 Um, and that actually is more helpful than you might think.

13:14 Um, I have had people that tell me, "Hey, I'm signed in," um, or, or, "I can't see the content," something like that.

13:21 Typically it was, "I've signed into the server, I can't see the content that I had. It was just there yesterday," or something like that.

13:27 We ran multiple environments, uh, a lower environment and a production environment.

13:32 Uh, and so, um, what I could do quickly as an admin, I could say, "Hey, I'm seeing last time you logged in was August tenth, uh, three oh six. You know, what URL are you using? Or send me a screenshot, let's see what's really going on."

13:48 And you will have this for all users in Tableau, um, Server or Tableau Cloud. Um, even if they've been unlicensed, uh, or whatnot, um, you'll have a list of users, uh, and you can actually, um… This is where you'll manage their site roles too, um, for the environment.

14:15 And schedules, this is Tableau Server only. Uh, so this will be this is a little bit of a surprise to my admin, uh, friends when I go in and do a cloud migration for them and walking them through it.

14:27 Um, schedules is done differently. It- schedules are still there in Tableau Cloud, but the way that you view schedules is different in Tableau Cloud.

14:36 So in, uh, Tableau Server, um, when you brand-new, fresh, and installed, uh, and you go to this page, I think there's some default ones for, like, end of month and such like that, um, just to get you going.

14:49 But you will have to create out all the schedules for all, for your entire server.

14:54 Um, what this looked like at companies that I worked at in the past was, you know, we would have hourly, um, and we would have, um, uh, uh, flows, subscriptions, uh, and extracts, all are different schedules.

15:09 Uh, and then we would have even, um, uh, time blocks. We, we actually did every single hour, we would let you refresh something.

15:17 Um, I think starting, you know, five AM to close of business day. So you had five AM, six AM, seven AM, eight AM.

15:24 Um, and the nice thing that we did was, um, we would put in the time and also, uh, we would also put in the, um, the time zone that it was running in. Uh, since we– I've supported customers globally, uh, it always helped them to understand, you know, the server that I'm logging into, where is it located? What does that time mean? Um, if I'm in the UK and Kevin's hosting it in, you know, Austin or US East Two, what time am I, am I running it on?

15:54 So adding the, the time zone there is helpful.

15:57 Um, but once you get your schedule set out, it's sort of a once and done, um, and then you… I typically had some users that, uh, wanted to ad hoc. I think my favorite was, "Can you give me an extract that can run every fifteen minutes?" You look at the data source, it can only– it has to take an hour to refresh.

16:15 Uh, and had to have that conversation of, uh, Tableau can't get the data faster than the data can be extracted. So, you know, um, it's a,

16:25 a give and take, you know? You have to figure out where your user needs to be, uh, and what you can actually provide with them. Um, because, uh, you know, uh, users left alone, uh, I have seen them tie up some backgrounders, um, and have put things in queues, uh, using schedules incorrectly.

16:45 And then jobs. Um, jobs is a pretty c- c- cool area. Um, it gives you a sort of a quick look.

16:54 Um, I was sort of old school. In the older versions, they didn't have this or I didn't use it as much. But this will actually show you of all the jobs that have run on your server or in cloud, so also in cloud.

17:06 Um, and it can– it will show you, um, the status, which will be complete with a nice green check mark or failed with a red check, uh, red box X mark.

17:17 Um, also see the runtime, um, and the queue time. Uh, queue time as being, you know, how long it had to wait until it got to run.

17:28 Um, so you know, that helps in investigating some things. If people were trying to, um, extract things more frequently because, um, it's not coming out on time, you might wanna look at the queue time, make sure there's not a backup there, um, affecting when the job kicks off. Um, now, if the runtime's high, have to look at other things too.

17:49 Um, I believe this is only a twenty-four hour s- yeah, twenty-four-hour snapshot.

17:53 So every day, if you came in, uh, you could click this and you'd see, you know, what has run in twenty-four hours then.

18:01 Hey, Christian. Yeah, I love schedules too.

18:05 Uh, and then tasks. Um, everything scheduled grouped by task right here. Um, this is a really good way, uh, when I'm doing cloud migrations or looking, um, to help somebody out with a, uh, a deployment or, or, uh, an environment.

18:24 Um, this shows me, you know, how many extracts you have, how many flows, subscriptions, you know, really what's going on in the server in a pretty quick way. Um, and you can toggle through these to see it.

18:36 Um, you know, you can have a small, um, extract, uh, like here, like two. This can go into the thousands. Uh, I don't think there's any limit really.

18:45 Uh, and the nice thing here is, uh, you can actually click on, you know, that workbook and the highlighted text there and navigate to the object.

18:54 And you can also see, uh, what schedule it's on.

18:57 Um, so we talked about how we had the schedule, so you can actually see what schedule it was running on, um, and then, you know, when it was last updated and next update.

19:08 Yeah, and then this is for Tableau Server only. Um, this one made me– I had to get used to this when going Tableau Cloud, uh, since, you know, uh, uh, been doing it for so many years. I'm just used to seeing my infrastructure and seeing the processes and what was running.

19:24 Um, and Tableau Server, um, this will show you all your servers. This is a single-node deployment, so we only have one. Uh, and it will tell you your server name at the top. Uh, blanked that out for privacy reasons in this, uh, demonstration or this, uh, deck. But, uh, it'll tell you the server and your processes that are running. Um, you have statuses down there.

19:45 Um, active is always good. Green is good.

19:49 Red is scary morning, uh, especially if it's all red. Uh, you can see if it's busy though, um, and, uh, we have backgrounder jobs. Backgrounders do the extracts, runs, uh, send out emails, and things like that. So if it's processing a job, it will have that busy symbol there.

20:06 Um, and, uh, you have the refresh button there to check, uh, to update that status too.

20:12 Um, unlicensed, I have seen. It's uncommon, but it does happen. Down happens. Um, and then status unavailable is, that one's fun. Um, you might wanna call Brad or I.

20:26 Text us if you see that one. Um, that's pretty much, uh, the primary node can no longer– Whatever process is running, um, and it's looking for a response from that process, uh, it's not getting it, so it'll return a status unavailable.

20:44 And in a Tableau Cloud, you don't have to worry about this, so you know that is a pro.

20:50 And then, um, some of the, um, some of the health monitoring and built-in reports, um, that we have available, uh, 'cause I think early on in my career, it was, you know, when did this run and what was the status and da da da. And I thought maybe I had to crack open Tableau Desktop, connect it to Tableau Server, and build a report, and drill down.

21:13 No, don't have to do any of that.

21:15 Um, Tableau Cloud, Tableau Server has a lot of useful built-in reports.

21:20 Um, they are not the fastest, so, um, do chuckle when your users say that their dashboard is slow and it only loaded in three seconds.

21:29 Uh, these might take seven, but you know, you're pulling back a lot of information. Uh, best thing about background tasks for extracts is, as an admin, I always had, uh, questions about, you know, um, "Hey, it failed. Why?" Um, so I could go into this report, um, and actually look through, filter down to the actual extract.

21:48 Um, and in this picture, if you would hover over any one of these red X's, you could actually see, um, what, what the ob– what was getting extracted, what failed, um, if it had a failure error, what that was. You could actually see what node it was processed on if you're running in a multi-node environment.

22:07 Um, and the other good thing is, um, you know, you can click on successes up here or errors up here, and it automatically filters the report for you.

22:16 Um, and then I think I spent a lot of time, uh, for runtime. I just wanted to filter out things that were, you know, I think like sixty-four hundred– sixty-four thousand seconds or something like that. That's a common one or something, uh, whatever that relates to in minutes or hours.

22:31 Uh, and I can see my long-running extracts and why they failed.

22:35 Um, and you can get some interesting ones. Um, you know, uh, if the database decides, "Hey, extracts run too long.

22:42 I'm terminating the connection," um, that would be one that you could hover over that, that error and actually find that, um, and relay that information back.

22:55 Yeah, stats for load times. This is another one. You know how I said that your users will think reports are slow if they don't load in three seconds?

23:02 Well, you can go here and verify whether they're telling the truth or not. If their three seconds is your three seconds, or if you're operating on different timescale. Um, but the great thing is it shows the average load time. Um, in Tableau Server, um, you know, you might, depending on you're managing infrastructure and growth and, and users and things like that, and hopefully, you know, Tableau Server grows infinitively, uh, while you're, you're running it there at your company.

23:32 Um, you know, this might be where if your average load times start creeping up, you might wanna look into adding additional node or something like that. Um, but also, you know, um, you could also look into the deviation, like here. Out here, there's a pretty big deviation from the average of five point one seconds.

23:50 Um, so you could actually start looking at maybe the time that that ran, uh, try to maybe identify, uh, what was going on. Maybe there's some downtime on a database, downstream process, or something like that impacting it. Um, but, uh, this would give you a good idea. Also gives you a great idea of, uh, what are the worst-running reports on your server or your cloud environment.

24:14 And maybe who needs, uh, maybe when you start seeing it's well outside of the normal range, um, we need to go see what that report is doing, trying to do, and how we can get that more efficient.

24:26 Oh, am I breaking anything?

24:28 Go for it

24:29 Brad Fair: I was going to say, I have something to add on this too for, for the, um, for the Tableau Server people that are, are out there. A lot of times you'll see, uh, somewhere between one and the number of VizQL server processes you've got as outliers on the right-hand side. Like on this screen, we, we have that one right there. You have one VizQL server process on this machine.

24:53 That indicates a cache miss, and then additional traffic actually hits that cache. So you'll see them start to, uh, compound towards the lower end because now the, the cache is warm. So if you just have a few of those tall outliers like that, it might not be worth checking into. It's when they start stacking up there that it starts to matter more, I think.

25:17 Kevin O'Donovan: Good point. Yeah. Thank you, Brad. Um, yeah, cache, cache is awesome on Tableau Server. Uh, I, uh, uh, when I was at Indeed, they had, um… it was primarily, they had a lot of database servers. Um, so I think I was running almost four hundred gigs of RAM, and that was the first time I had that much RAM in Tableau Server. Uh, and VizQL, if you give it RAM, it will, it will cache it.

25:44 It would probably just sit there at seventy, eighty percent, um, and just cache. Like, if you give it the RAM, it would just cache it, and that was great for users. Um, had to get used to that and was told, you know, it's not gonna go to a hundred because it's sitting at eighty. It, it does manage itself, so that was good to hear.

26:03 Um, yeah, and sort of continuing on the, on the, the theme of performance and, uh, load times, uh, performance of views is another great one. Um, this is out of the box and color-coded, uh, which I think is great. You know, probably wanna see everything under five seconds.

26:22 Um, so, um, you know, you have your bands here for three seconds and clear to ten.

26:28 Um, and then it even gives you the session counts for the individual views too.

26:33 Um, but what this can do, it's also interactive, so you can go through and, um, you know, hover and click and drill down into this information. Um, it's not unusual to see red really. Um, it just, just depends.

26:48 Um, you know, um, so I wouldn't say, you know, my goal was never, hey, I wanna see this, you know, a hundred percent green or ninety-five percent green.

26:57 Um, but what this could tell me is I could sort of track performance over time, especially down here in two, in number two, where the days are. I could really see how it was going, sort of look for trends and such like that, and drill down and investigate.

27:11 Um, sometimes you're just reporting on stuff that's big and, you know, uh, it takes time to load things into views that are big. But yeah, this is another great report, and there's p- many more reports. Uh, we just wanted to pick some of the few that we use the most, uh, in our times being admins and helping users.

27:37 Yeah. And then settings, that's going to definitely be an admin-only view that you see. Uh, so if you have, if you've been promoted to admin or accidentally promoted to admin, uh, you will get the settings section.

27:51 So on Tableau Server, um, you have the als- uh, if you're running multiple sites, you'll have a button, uh, from your sites drop-down menu that says, uh, manage all sites.

28:02 Uh, and then the settings there on Tableau Server will manage all the sites there. Um, if you are in your site, um, default site, I think many, many of us know that one.

28:14 Uh, if you are on that site and you click settings, you'll go into the site settings for that site specifically, which will be a different subset of settings.

28:22 Uh, in Tableau Cloud, uh, since, uh, you get sites on Tableau Cloud, uh, you will have the site settings only. Um, that's not a problem. Uh, you don't need the other settings on Tableau Cloud at all.

28:35 Um, so, uh, you will have just your site settings there. Um, some of the things that we have in there are revision history. Um, so what that is, is if you're not aware, in Tableau Server, Tableau Cloud, uh, there's revision history on every workbook that's published. And you can actually look at that revision history and pull up an old version of the workbook.

28:58 Um, and what Tableau Server, Tableau Cloud does is it actually stores those. And in this, um, uh, I can actually go to the next slide. I'm seeing that's up there.

29:08 Uh, what that does is it, uh, you can tell the limit of the number of, of, uh, revisions that you wanna store on your server.

29:17 Uh, default is twenty-five. Um, the caveat is this does take space.

29:23 Um, but the great thing is, um, is I had a user published over something, thought they lost it, didn't have it on their desktop or had an old version, whatever it may be.

29:35 Um, rather than going to a lower environment trying to fish it out, we clicked right into revision history and recovered it very quickly. Um, you can download the revision history there. Uh, in Web Edit, you can just publish it back up as the, uh, as a report too, and publish over the existing report.

29:53 And then, um, you also have a clear revision history button here, which will free up some disk space.

30:01 Um, but it is not immediately. Uh, I have noticed that, uh, if you do– if you're sitting in a test environment and– well, my case was we had a test environment. We threw a backup in, um, and we didn't need– we wanted to trim out the space, and we bulk deleted stuff, cleared revision history, was waiting for the disk space to clear up. Um, it eventually did clear up, but it wasn't instantaneous.

30:25 So if you're, if you think you Click this and it's like on your desktop where you throw something in the recycle bin.

30:31 Um, it, and then clear the recycle bin, your memory's back. Uh, it's not that quick, but it does do it.

30:42 Uh, another one that you get in settings is email settings. Um, and I will say there's a lot of settings.

30:48 Uh, Brad and I both use Control + F in our browser to find things quickly on the settings.

30:55 Um, they're not alphabetical. Um, there is some logic to it if you've been into it, or maybe my brain just remembers where they are.

31:03 Uh, but I still use, uh, Control + F to find my settings. But email settings is one of them.

31:10 Uh, and in here you can actually either, uh, keep the default address, uh, or use a custom address. So, um, popular for me when I did it was, you know, no reply, @company.com.

31:22 Uh, and then you can also add in a footer here or a custom footer. Um, I should say you can add in a custom footer or keep it to none.

31:34 Uh, and this is another good one. Um, so if you're in Tableau Server, um, and even Tableau Cloud, um, it- sometimes you get into a situation where for whatever reason an extract is out there and either it's long-running and it gets canceled a lot, uh, you know, runs out of time to finish, or errors out.

31:55 Um, what Tableau can do for you is it can actually automatically suspend the, the refresh.

32:01 Um, what that does is when it comes up to be run, um, Tableau has marked it as do not run or, you know, skip.

32:11 Uh, and that's actually the term they use when you're looking at your background tasks or extracts, so it'll just say skipped.

32:17 What that means is, um, when you've enabled this and you set your desired setting, here it's 32, that's the default, uh, it means, you know, in this case it tried 32 times, um, it tried to run 33 times, and it got skipped, it got canceled, um, or suspended I should say. Uh, what that does for you is you're not tying up, um, you know, background, uh, background jobs, um, on Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud, which means things that are going to run correctly will go ahead and, um, run, um…

32:54 It'll free up that space for those jobs that can run, um, successfully and not waste time on this.

33:00 Um, I would always eventually get something on Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud. There's a extract limit. Tableau Server, you can expand it. Uh, I would be cautious about expanding that, uh, because it is a system-wide variable, so you do it for one user, you do it for all.

33:18 Uh, but you know, it goes to the two-hour limit, uh, 'cause, you know, it's, was, uh, they're growing over time, hits the two-hour limit, starts failing.

33:28 Well, that means you've tied up a job or resources for two hours on a job that you know will fail.

33:34 Um, so rather than having that happen continuously forever, it will just go ahead and skip it for you.

33:41 Brad Fair: I wanted to hop in as someone asked if this, uh, 32 is about consecutive failures refreshing, and, uh, it's not. It's about the, the number of days that go by without anybody accessing a piece of content that, um, that's based on that refresh. It's like, if, if no one's using the data, why keep the data up to date? And sometimes the answer is quarterly reporting, right?

34:05 But, um, sometimes the, the answer is, yeah, why, why even bother with a refresh?

34:20 Kevin O'Donovan: Thank you, Brad.

34:21 Um, and another good one, I know I touched on some of this, on, um, on time zones. Um, it's, uh, uh, it… I think we all work globally, um, or, you know, maybe have different time zones, at least in the United States and other places.

34:37 Um, so a good thing to do is to set your ti- your site time zone. Um, and you can actually do that in your settings section here. Um, there is a huge list of them.

34:50 Um, there's several for Americas, obviously.

34:54 Uh, and, um, you can go ahead and set that here, and what that will do is for that site, it will set the time zone that everything will go ahead and, um, run on, whether that's your scheduled emails, uh, running at a certain time, your extracts running at a certain time, um, this will be the time zone that displays your users and runs off of.

35:19 All righty. I think I'm just a little ahead of time, but for questions.

35:27 Brad Fair: Uh, we had someone ask if the custom email address is something available on Tableau Cloud. The one you showed is, is definitely Tableau Server, uh, because in order to send email from Tableau Server, you, you already have to have your own SMTP, uh, server configured. But with Tableau Cloud, you, you don't, and you couldn't just pick an email for, for Tableau Cloud to use.

35:54 So, if you do want to customize your email on Tableau Cloud, that is a setting on the page.

36:01 Um, it's just on the site settings general page, and it allows you to specify your own SMTP server so that you can then specify the domain that users have and the, the, the sender's email address and name.

36:21 Kevin O'Donovan: Yeah. Good call.

36:23 Brad Fair: It doesn't appear to let you put a footer in there though, so that, that seems like a little bit of a, a behavior difference. I guess if it's your SMTP server, you could put whatever you want in the email, but it's, it's not the same config screen as far as the, the settings page is concerned.

36:42 Kevin O'Donovan: Yeah. And that's one of the nuances or differences you'll see between Tableau Cloud and Tableau Server. Um, what, 98% the same, but one of those little slight differences.

36:59 Brad Fair: Yeah. We had someone also say, "Any thoughts on detecting the cause of a poor for- poor performing report that has a bad query?

37:08 I've been asked before to figure out why the server is slow just to find out that the SQL database was the cause." And I have… I could spend hours, probably days, talking about performance optimization and, and diagnostics and troubleshooting.

37:24 But there, um, there are a couple really good options that I'd suggest you use. Um, one is available server side, um, only, it doesn't work on Tableau Cloud, which is, uh, performance recording, and I can hunt down a link and, and send that on how to take a performance recording.

37:44 What that shows you is all of the individual steps that a workbook takes to render, and you'll see in those steps a Gantt chart with, uh, the queries in them. So when you see very long queries and a, a bunch of things waiting on these queries to complete, then, uh, you know, that kind of points at a, a SQL statement that's not great. Um, you can also copy out the SQL statement that's executing and, and actually, like, put that into other tools to maybe see what to improve.

38:18 That's only available on Tableau Server, not Cloud, but it is also available on Tableau Desktop. So in… If you can download the content, run that same recording from Tableau Desktop, then you'll, you'll get the same info.

38:39 We have someone ask, "In Tableau Cloud, is there a setting that notifies the admin if a report refreshes successfully but returns no data?" Um,

38:50 I'm trying to think. Like, I know that the opposite of that is possible.

38:55 You can receive subscriptions when, um, you can receive subscriptions when you have data in a view and, and bypass them when you don't have data in that view. You can also set up data alerts, uh, where, uh, a data alert sends you an email, uh, when some value in your dashboard crosses some threshold, and I feel like, uh, a zero row count value is, is a, a good thing to set up there.

39:31 So, you know, you might be able to create a workbook that inspects how many, how many records are in there, and if, uh, if it lands on zero, it sends you an email. Yeah, data-driven alerts.

39:43 Exactly. Kevin, what do you think? Is there another approach for finding out if a, a extract refresh shows no data?

39:51 Kevin O'Donovan: Yeah.

39:52 I had this question once before, and, uh, out of the box natively, uh, like you said, there's nothing. Um, but I do believe my user, uh, once I… We had data-driven alerts and cued them to that, they did implement something in the workbook like that where it looked for, you know, uh, if the record count is zero or, or some column in there, um, that they would get an alert then, um, for that item.

40:19 That's how I've seen it done.

40:22 Brad Fair: It seems like that's the consensus with, uh, with some other folks in the, in the chat.

40:27 Uh, we had someone ask, uh, "Is the deck and recording also available afterward?" And yes. Yes it is. Uh, I thank you for joining at 1:00 in the morning as we approach 2:00 or beyond in the morning.

40:43 Um, hopefully, we can set up some, some future meetings to accommodate the, the different time zones of everyone in, in the rest of the world, uh, 'cause we're, we're a global user group.

40:55 Kevin O'Donovan: Yeah. That's actually good. Uh, glad we got that. Brad and I were trying to figure out what time zone to would offer another session at, and if we were reachable.

41:09 Brad Fair: Yes. Yeah. Uh, we certainly are. So I'm a night owl. I'd, I'd be happy to run a, a midnight session for me so that it's someone else's, you know, midday. That's totally fine.

41:21 Kevin O'Donovan: Uh, yeah. That's how I found out sometime where my infrastructure team was.

41:28 I had a outage, went all day, tired, ready to go to bed, and they start pinging me because they were in, like, Japan.

41:39 Brad Fair: Yeah.

41:39 Kevin O'Donovan: They're like, "You really want to talk to us."

41:44 Brad Fair: Well, do we have, uh, do we have any other questions about, uh, server or cloud a- administration, uh, tips and tricks?

41:52 Any war stories, uh, anyone else wants to share? I'm, I'm happy to request people come onto the microphone to talk.

42:01 Um, so Kevin, Toby said, "Another part of being an accidental admin is the TSM page for Tableau Server. Um, will you be doing something on that?" You have access to your TSM page? I mean, is that something-

42:14 Kevin O'Donovan: Yeah

42:14 Brad Fair: … that you could show a little bit of before w- we're, we're off the call?

42:18 Kevin O'Donovan: Um, yeah. Actually-

42:20 Brad Fair: And you're allowed to say no, 'cause it, it definitely does have some, some config in there-

42:24 Kevin O'Donovan: Yeah

42:24 Brad Fair: … that's, that's yours.

42:26 Kevin O'Donovan: Yeah. I would s- uh, I could definitely do another session on it.

42:32 Uh, I didn't know if that was too technical, so I'm glad to see there are some technical people out there like me that love exploring the TSM piece,

42:44 and I could probably put some, my favorite commands together and such like that together.

42:48 Brad Fair: Yeah.

42:50 How many of you, um, how many of you manage your server with a TSM web interface versus the TSM command line interface? Just out of curiosity.

43:01 I tend to prefer the command line.

43:07 Both.

43:08 People prefer the UI. I'll tell you, when I'm trying to specify how many of each process to put on which server, the UI is a little bit easier. These days I do it with Ansible, so it's, it's just typing numbers in, um, a config file. But, uh, it's, it's easier because then you don't have to go guess what process name it is, because it's not always intuitive.

43:31 Both is the…

43:33 It, it looks like both wins there. That's the consensus.

43:38 Awesome.

43:39 Well, I love that. And an idea about another session, like TSM and, and those administrative aspects of server.

43:47 Kevin O'Donovan: Yeah.

43:48 Brad Fair: Um, while people are thinking about ideas for other sessions, if there are any other ideas you have, please let us know in, in the chat. Because we, um, we think there's probably an infinite amount of things that we could talk about, and it's easier for us to narrow things down if, if anyone else has, uh, input on that.

44:10 AI governance, Tableau Bridge.

44:13 How many of you find yourself using Tableau Bridge? Uh, that was the part of, Kevin, the, the… in the slide deck when it said Tableau Cloud, you don't manage infrastructure, and, and I-

44:24 Kevin O'Donovan: Yeah.

44:24 Brad Fair: … about, um, actually that. I'm like, eh, you kind of do if you have Bridge.

44:31 Kevin O'Donovan: Y- y- yeah.

44:32 Um, it, it, Bridge seems easy at a glance, especially when you're reading the page.

44:38 Brad Fair: Right.

44:39 Kevin O'Donovan: Um, but I've gotten to be kind of a Bridge expert.

44:43 Brad Fair: Yeah.

44:44 Kevin O'Donovan: I think it's like learning Excel back in the day.

44:47 You were known as the person that could do good Excel, so you just go back to that person.

44:52 Brad Fair: Yep.

44:53 Kevin O'Donovan: But, uh, yeah, we could cover something on Bridge potentially.

44:59 Brad Fair: Awesome. Yeah, and I love the, the cloud admin and AI governance. And that story is, um, evolving very quickly. So that's, I think that's a, a very relevant conversation. Do's and don'ts as Tableau Server admins, Tableau Cloud as a newbie, and experience, and then, uh, info on tracking Desktop license usage. That one is, that one's great because to some extent there is Desktop license usage tracking already native to Tableau and Tableau Server if you're using login-based license management.

45:35 So if you have access to the relevant part of your settings page, you might actually see, um, like, one of the admin dashboards that talks about license management.

45:47 And if you are a Tableau Server admin that is still handing out actual keys to your Tableau Desktop user, there's still an approach to make the, the Tableau Desktop register with Tableau Server so that you can keep track of it.

46:05 Admin handing out keys. You, you need to find your way to some, uh, l- login-based license management.

46:11 But in the meantime, yeah, I can, I can find a link real quick about how to track that with Tableau Server.

46:20 Kevin O'Donovan: Yeah. While you do that, uh, back at General Motors, before they had login-based license management, uh, we actually, uh, handed out keys.

46:33 You know, put in a ticket, send the key to them via, via screenshare, type the key in, and then let them activate it. And we worked with our team that did the software deployments on, like, pushed out the software deployments, and they were able to actually track, uh, how long someone opened Tableau Desktop over a certain range of time, and then we worked off of that.

47:03 Uh, I think if it was one hour, we wanted Tableau Desktop open.

47:10 Um, even I got my license pulled back because I forgot to open Tableau Desktop one month.

47:18 Brad Fair: You gotta, you gotta keep track of those things. Uh, the, uh, all of the-

47:22 Kevin O'Donovan: First of the-

47:22 Brad Fair: … the accounting people, you know.

47:24 Kevin O'Donovan: First of the month, I was on Tableau Desktop for seven hours a day.

47:29 Brad Fair: There you go. I rarely find myself in Tableau Desktop, but once in a while I do.

47:33 So handing out keys, uh, Toby mentioned, tracking is done with command line parameters, and it kind of complicates the process.

47:41 Steve, I'm glad you commented because i- it's true, you have to use the command line parameters to tell Tableau Desktop where to go register with for tracking purposes. But then Steve said, "We deploy Tableau Desktop through SCCM," System Center Configuration Manager, I think. So it's bu- it's built into the install package to register with the server for license tracking.

48:05 So yeah, if, if you can build an installer package and, and deploy that to your Tableau Desktop users, you can kind of sneak the command line parameters into it so that they can't bypass that.

48:20 Kevin O'Donovan: That's exactly how we did it at General Motors there.

48:23 Brad Fair: Yep. That's, that's the way to do it, and it's k- it's kind of a pain for the smaller, uh, organizations that don't have that kind of, um, you know, o- operational process in place, but it, uh, it does work. Like, that's, that's the point of that approach. It is just, it's extra steps, you know? Login-based license management, um, kind of fixes that.

48:46 Kevin O'Donovan: Y- that was a big help to us.

48:48 And, and indeed, we, we track the, uh, the user's licenses through login-based license License management

48:58 Brad Fair: Yeah. It's, it's the way to do.

49:00 Cool.

49:01 We really appreciate all of the, the thoughts and ideas about, you know, the different topics that we can present with.

49:08 And we have advanced users with admin rights. They do their own install, and then, yeah, of course, you, you miss a logged licenses, but then you invariably have them sending you messages saying, "Why can't I publish this new feature?" 'Cause, you know, Desktop leads Server as far as versions and features.

49:27 Uh, so that's, that's always, uh, it's always an interesting problem to run into.

49:32 Kevin O'Donovan: And that does bring me to one other thought. Um, Tableau Cloud does alleviate the problem of having your users update Tableau Desktop, uh, above your server version, uh, which inevitably, I would get a user that says, "This doesn't work. This feature doesn't work." Look at the version and find out they hit the Update Now button and have a new version of the server.

49:59 Brad Fair: Yep.

50:00 Yeah. It makes it easy. Tableau wants to prompt you for, you know, patch updates, or they show you the little thing in the bottom right-hand corner for a totally new release that comes out. And especially if you've heard all of the hype about the, the new features from whichever Tableau influencers you follow, then kind of makes you wanna go get them.

50:20 But if your server isn't there, it won't matter much.

50:26 Cool. Well, Kevin, I think I'll, I'll toss it back over to you for a, a, a close, and then we might be able to, might be able to wrap up just a few minutes early.

50:35 Kevin O'Donovan: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Brad.

50:37 Um, just wanna thank everyone for taking time out of their day to join us. Um, always love talking about Tableau Server, Tableau Cloud. Um, you can feel free to reach out to me, um, uh, if you have any questions or wanna just link up.

50:52 Um, but yeah, just really appreciate it. Uh, really love the opportunity to speak to y'all today and, um, I personally love helping other admins learn Tableau Server, Tableau Server administration, Tableau Cloud administration. That's how I learned. Um, so anything I can give back to the community, I'd love to help.

51:10 Brad Fair: Thank you all. Take care.

51:12 Kevin O'Donovan: Take care, everyone.