Skip to main content

Tableau

Overview​

Our Tableau integration can help you visualise column-level lineage dependencies between warehouse tables and Tableau entities using the Data Lineage.

Lineage from upstream data warehouses into Tableau is supported for the following data warehouse types:

  • Snowflake
  • Redshift
  • Databricks
  • BigQuery

Downstream Tableau entities show up in the Dependencies tab of data diff results. Potentially impacted Tableau entity names are also automatically identified in the Datafold Cloud CI printout.

The following Tableau entities types will appear in Lineage, data diff results, and the Datafold Cloud CI printout:

  • Tableau Data Sources and related fields;
  • Workbooks and related fields;
  • Dashboards.
note

To declutter ✨ the Datafold Cloud lineage, Datafold filters out Tableau Data Sources and Data Source fields that have no downstream dependencies.

If you're interested in learning more about the Datafold Cloud integration, please reach out to our team.

Set up your Tableau instance​

To connect Datafold to Tableau, you will require the following credentials from your Tableau site:

  • Server URL,
  • Site Name,
  • Token Name,
  • Token Value.

If you are using Tableau Server​

Tableau Server is an installation of Tableau that you are managing on your company's own infrastructure and domain. This is an alternative to using a Tableau Cloud subscription. 

tsm maintenance metadata-services enable
  • Ensure that your Tableau Server instance is accessible to Datafold. Please get in touch with our team to set this up.

Obtaining server URL & Site Name​

These can be found from URL of your Tableau home page. For instance, if your home page is:

https://eu-west-1a.online.tableau.com/#/site/mysupersite/home

Then:

  • Server URL is https://eu-west-1a.online.tableau.com (the hostname with https in front)
  • Site Name is mysupersite (the part directly after #/site/ and until the next /)

Obtaining Token Name & Token Value​

Ensure that Personal Access Tokens are enabled on your Tableau site. For that, navigate to Settings and there, on the General tab, search for Personal Access Tokens. That feature needs to be enabled — not necessarily for everyone but for the user for whom we will be creating the token Datafold will use.

Now that Personal Access Tokens are enabled, click on your user’s avatar in the top right, choose My Account Settings in the pop-up menu, and then search for Personal Access Tokens on your settings page.

Input a desired name, say datafold, into the Token Name field, and click Create Token.

This will open a popup window. Click Copy Secret and save the copied value somewhere — you will use this when setting up Datafold. You can read more about personal access tokens on the official Tableau documentation here.

Create a Tableau Integration​

Navigate to ⚙️ Settings → Integrations → Data Apps. Click ➕ Add new integration.

A click on Tableau will lead you to the integration creation screen. Fill in the fields with data we obtained earlier. See the screenshot for hints.

…and click Save.

What's next?​

The initial sync might take some time; it depends on the number of objects at your Tableau site. Eventually, Tableau entities — Data Sources, Workbooks, and Dashboards should appear at your Lineage tab.

tip

Tracking Jobs explains how to find out when your data app integration is ready.

Click on a Tableau entity will lead you to the Lineage screen:

tip

As you might have noticed on the screenshots above, Datafold does not display Tableau Sheets. Instead, we group, and deduplicate, all Fields of all Sheets within a Workbook and display them as Fields of the Workbook.

On the screenshot directly above, Demo Workbook might include one Sheet with Created At field and another with Sub Plan field, but for our purposes we unite all of those fields beneath the Workbook — which makes the Lineage graph much less cluttered, and much easier to browse 😏

🚨 I changed something in Tableau — but Datafold does not reflect my changes!​

Datafold relies on Tableau API to retrieve information about Tableau data model. Due to caching, Tableau API might be a bit late to reflect a recently introduced change. If your changes are not being displayed at Datafold, please wait for a few hours — and they should appear 👌