Tableau Conference 2015: Viva Las Vizzes!

Wow, what an amazing week!

A huge THANK YOU to all of our Tableau customers and to our Tableau Conference team for putting on another spectacular Tableau Conference!

I enjoyed catching up with customers, seeing patients at the Tableau Doctor clinic, helping out in several of our Hands-on-Training sessions, and attending the keynotes.

Check out Ellie Fields' recap of the Devs on Stage keynote for what new features are on the horizon!  I'm especially pumped about cross-database joins, workbook version control, enhanced support for device specific dashboards, vizzes in the tooltip, additional built-in statistics like k-means clustering, our new apps, and more... There is just too much to list!

I hope you can all join us for TC16 in Austin, TX.  It's never too early to register.

See ya'll there!

Embedding Tableau into SFDC via iframe

Looking to get started with Tableau embedded into SFDC?

Below you'll find a quick outline for creating a Visualforce tab and embedding Tableau via an <iframe>.  The steps outlined also include extending access to the Salesforce1 mobile app.  If you require richer integration, you can use the SFDC canvas adapter to create an app within the SFDC Canvas framework. (not covered in this post)

While logged in as a Salesforce Admin, select your username, and click Setup.

Click Develop and create a new VisualForce page.

 Here I embed a Dashboard using a simple iframe.  Don't forget all your embed parameters.

Then under Create, select Tabs, and create a new VisualForce Tab.

Select the VisualForce Page we just created and select a style.

Next, under Administration Setup, select Mobile Administration.

Select Mobile Navigation...

Then add the VisualForce Tab you created to the Navigation Menu Items Selected.

 Let's test it out.  I'm using Google Chrome with the Salesforce1 Simulator.

Then, while logged into SFDC, click this icon.

 Navigate... and enjoy!

Stay tuned for a future article on authentication options...

Using Tableau with Vertica?

Check out this whitepaper on Tableau/Vertica best practices.

Monitor Cluster Health with Tableau Server

Heeyy Mon,

You have a Tableau Server?  Need to monitor CPU, RAM, network, and hard-disk usage?  Cache-hit ratio, request latency, active sessions, and more?  Check out TabMon!

Looking for past versions of Tableau?

If you ever need to download a different version of Tableau, you can find it here.

Connecting Tableau to Presto

Here is a short, but hopefully useful one.  I have several customers I support that are using Presto.  In case you are looking to connect Tableau to Presto, here is a collection of options:

Presto Github ODBC driver: https://github.com/prestodb/presto-odbc/releases

'Prestogres' by Treasure-Data: https://github.com/treasure-data/prestogres

Presto WDC: https://github.com/facebook/presto/pull/3104 

Teradata also announced enterprise support for Presto back in June, so more options should be coming.

Please add comments if you have successfully connected via other means.

Intro to the Web Data Connector

One of the new features that I am most excited about in Tableau 9.1 is the Web Data Connector (WDC).  It simplifies the process of connecting Tableau to data that doesn't already have a native connector.  It allows you to connect to virtually anything that can be queried over http or https, including web services, JSON, XML, and REST APIs.  Be sure to bookmark the Web Data Connector Developers section of the community if this is of interest to you.

Although some assembly is required, a Web Data Connector is essentially a simple HTML page with a bit of Javascript code that queries an http target and builds a TDE (Tableau Data Extract).  Because the connector is something you can build with a bit of script, you can even combine multiple datasources in a single workflow.  Think of all the possibilities!

Well let's say you want to connect to Google sheets.  How do you get started?  Well if someone out there is already hosting a WDC for Google sheets, you can just connect using that URL when prompted.  For reference, here is a list of community created WDCs so far, some hosted, some that you'll have to host yourself.  Try out the import.io connector if you want to connect to some web data fast.

If you don't have a hosted option available, you may need to host it yourself.  One option is to spin up a web server on your local machine so that you can call your html page through the Web Data connector option in Tableau Desktop. The documentation in the aforementioned resources will include details on how to setup Python as a local web server as an example.

If you want to make this WDC available across your organization, and/or make scheduled refreshes of the extract available, you will need to import the .html file into Tableau Server.  By importing the WDC to Tableau Server, it becomes centralized, secure, and no longer requires Tableau Desktop users to spin up their own local server!  Now go connect to some web data and publish something cool to Tableau Public (using public data of course)!

Tableau and Salesforce: Empowering your Sales Teams with Best-in-Class Analytics

A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to work a Tableau booth at Salesforce's Annual Conference, Dreamforce.  I found the experience invigorating as customers gushed with excitement over the idea of embedding Tableau into Salesforce.  That's right, if you are looking to embed rich analytics directly into your CRM, then this will be worth a quick read.

Tableau is a Salesforce customer, and we make no secret of it.  In fact, our CDO and co-founder, Dr. Chris Stolte wrote an article about how we use it back in 2008.  At that time, (before Tableau had native connectivity directly to Salesforce data) Salesforce recommended pulling data from the cloud into a local data warehouse to report off of.  We use Forceamp to do this and then use Tableau for analytics on top of that.  For some customers this is still a good strategy for a variety of reasons

Since Tableau 8 was released over 2 years ago, we have provided native connectivity directly to Salesforce from Tableau.  I have seen challenges here and there given that our connector must adhere to the limitations proposed when querying through the Salesforce API.  Our first connector used the SFDC v26 API, while Tableau 9 now uses v30 for much better performance.

Whether your data resides in Salesforce or other cloud sources, local databases or flat files, Tableau can connect to all of that data and make it actionable within a framework that is already familiar.  Imagine being able to see the 'hot' leads your marketing team is generating, your support tickets that are being actively worked, your customer's historic spend, and your closed business vs. quota all in one place.  Well imagine no more, because this is a reality for our sales teams and other Tableau customers that have embedded Tableau Dashboards back into Salesforce!

There are multiple points of integration with differing levels of complexity.  I've embedded Tableau Dashboards into VisualForce pages using iframes, embedded using the Salesforce Canvas framework, and even embedded Tableau Dashboards into Salesforce1 (mobile app).

Interested?  Well if you would like to learn more, check out Embedding Sales Analytics with Salesforce Canvas, Embedding into Salesforce1 using Tableau on-premise or Tableau Online in the Cloud!, and the Salesforce Canvas adapter toolkit, complete with examples and documentation.  Stay tuned for future articles on the nitty-gritty.

What can I do to monitor or diagnose issues with Tableau Server?

Monitor Tableau Server Activity

The Tableau Server Repository is an included Postgres database that stores workbook and user metadata.  By default, 183 days of audit information will be stored there. Once you Enable External Access to your Tableau Server Repository (Postgres), you can use the 'tableau' or 'readonly' user to query the database over port 8060.

Download the Server Admin View workbooks

Also, check out the Tableau community for custom audit workbooks from other Tableau Server Administrators.

Monitor Server Performance and Processes

It's common for companies to have server monitoring applications in place like Nagios, Zabbix, or Splunk.  The data collected from these tools can be very valuable in monitoring the health of Tableau Server.  By monitoring specific processes you can identify bottlenecks and make tweaks to your Tableau Server Deployment for optimal performance.

Check out Tableau's KB article on Monitoring Tableau Server Performance.  This details how you can setup a capture of Windows Performance Monitor and includes which processes to monitor.

Alan Smithee's article on the topic, it includes a template to get started on setting up more complex Tableau Server Monitoring Dashboards.

Tableau Server Log File Forensics

Tableau Server creates a variety of different log files that you can parse.  When something unexpected occurs, the log files are the best place to look for what went wrong. 

Click here for Tableau Server Log file locations.