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Hi all, I love the Tableau Conference. But I also have a lot of fun at the smaller “Tableau On Tour” events. In particular I love the keynote speeches. We’ve had some crackers recently, with particular recent favourites being Tim … Continue reading
Hi all,
More on building that dream Tableau Centre of Excellence function. I’ve previously posted about how to structure your support team and ways to build user engagement with “Tableau Champions”, this post focuses on how you can use Tableau’s introspection capabilities to deliver a more proactive support function.
The traditional definition of proactive is as follows. To me it means means seeing into the future and 
getting to an issue before it even happens. In the world of IT Support, proactivity really is the Holy Grail, meaning the difference between a good support function and an amazing one. But it’s super-hard to achieve, especially in the complex enterprise level setups that have multiple break points. You can almost never prevent something from breaking, no matter how good your monitoring is.
What you can do is add some proactivity into the way your team operates by identifying when your users are not getting the best from your service. In Tableau Server world we have the ability to spot the following and much more.
I won’t go into how to achieve this, it’s the subject of a future post. But I’ll point you in the direction of these 2 posts that should get you on the way. Go check out Custom Admin Views by Mark Jackson and Why are my Extracts Failing – by Matt Francis.
I get my team to scan our admin views, to identify those users that in our opinion are not getting the best experience they can from Tableau. If we see someone who might be experiencing consistently slow visualisations, or have regularly failing extracts then we give them a call. Often the users won’t even have a complaint. But our message is “We think you’re not getting the best experience possible, and we want to make that happen”.
The initial reaction is often surprise. “I’m ok, I didn’t raise an issue” will be a common response. But then once we’ve worked with the user, and improved their experience, you’ll find they are blown away. You may even get a call from their management!
You’ll find this kind of service is very rare in most organisations so if you can deliver it, even sporadically, then you’ll be regarded very highly.
This is pretty simple, if a little time-consuming. Browse the Tableau content on your server. Spot something that doesn’t look great – it might be slow, not compliant with your best practices, or just fugly. Download that content, and give it a makeover. Make it look great, maybe add some improved functionality, make it nail best practices.
This is one of my team’s favourite activities due to the reaction of the user / client. They LOVE it. It really creates a sense of engagement, the user feels that your team actually really cares about them. We’ve also had our Tableau Champions participate in Makeovers which is even better as it saves my team some cycles.
Be careful though, some user content might be confidential and the user may not appreciate an admin poking around in their data. Also, remember that by doing this you are implying a criticism of their work, so handle the communication with care and sensitivity.
Also ensure that you don’t just change stuff and then drop it back on their laps. In a self-serve model like mine users develop and support their own content so it is crucial the user knows what you’ve changed, how you’ve changed it and what benefits you feel the modification brings. Pull them and their manager into a call, run through what you’ve done and then hand it back over to them to run with it.
These have been very successful in my organisation. Users truly appreciate the help and my team has fun doing it.
So there you are, a couple of tips for adding that gloss to your Tableau support service.
Cheers, Paul
Hello everyone.
You may know me as a Tableau Centre of Excellence manager. That can involve a lot of paperclip pushing skills, with the real work being done by my excellent team (thx @jakesviz & The Information Lab). But I do try and get down and dirty with my lovely Tableau Server environment to keep my skills fresh. Obviously I don’t mess with it – @jakesviz gets pretty protective about his Server.
This series of posts is my attempt to shed some light on the internals of Server. Note there are many more experts in this field than me (Craig Bloodworth, Mark Jackson, Jen Vaughan, Tamas Foldi, Mike Roberts, Angie Greenhaw – to name but a few) so please do comment if anything is incorrect here. Maybe you guys could help me evolve this post?
The backgrounder is a process that runs as part of the Tableau Server application. As the name suggests, it handles background tasks such as refreshing extracts, running subscriptions and also processes tasks initiated from tabcmd.
Here are the backgrounder processes. The .exe file and the .war file. The WAR file is a Web Application Archive, and contains all the necessary components and resources needed for a Web Application such as Backgrounder.
On a clustered environment you’ll find these files in D:\Program Files\Tableau\Tableau Server\worker.1\bin (may vary slightly with your installation).
Template (.templ) files – These files TBD
There are also a few .rb files in D:\Program Files\Tableau\Tableau Server\worker.1\tabmigrate\db\migrate.
And we also have a .properties file which contains all the config entries relevant to the backgrounder. It also has almost all of the other stuff that you’d find in the main workgroup.yml file which is odd. I’d have expected it to be just the backgrounder config.
Here is the location of the backgrounder log files
Here are 2 instances of backgrounder.exe running on my server (from Task Manager).
Backgrounder can be configured. There are several settings present in both workgroup.yml and backgrounder.properties. Workgroup.yml is the master config file, and it populates the backgrounder.properties (and other .properties files) when a ‘tabadmin configure’ is run.
I don’t know what all of these do (yet) and the only one I’ve ever edited is ‘backgrounder.extra_timeout_in_seconds‘ which sets the max time in seconds that a backgrounder session can run for. Tableau kills off the session if this threshold is reached. Useful for forcing users to optimise their extract times!
I also pay attention to the ‘backgrounder.vmopts‘ parameter, as this defines the size of the java heap space for this component. All components have a vmopts setting and I’ve had to increase them on occasion due to out of memory problems.
You may also want to change the ‘backgrounder.log.level‘ if you need more debug info, although Tableau logs are chatty enough for me.
If there’s a golden parameter in this lot that you get value from then let me know in the comments.
backgrounder.deploy.dir: D:/Program Files/Tableau/Tableau Server/data/tabsvc/backgrounder backgrounder.external_cache.concurrency_limit: 10 backgrounder.external_cache.enabled: true backgrounder.external_cache.num_connections: 1 backgrounder.external_native_query_cache_disable: true backgrounder.extra_timeout_in_seconds: 1800 backgrounder.failure_threshold_for_run_prevention: -1 backgrounder.jdbc.wg.connections: 8 backgrounder.jdbc.wg.idle_connections: 4 backgrounder.log.dir: D:/Program Files/Tableau/Tableau Server/data/tabsvc/logs/backgrounder backgrounder.log.level: info backgrounder.native_api.log.level: info backgrounder.out_of_date_schedule_minutes: 240 backgrounder.ping_dataengine.millis_to_wait: 5000 backgrounder.ping_dataengine.num_retries: 24 backgrounder.ping_services.num_retries: 10000000 backgrounder.ping_services.time_to_wait: 5000 backgrounder.purge_directories.directories: "" backgrounder.querylimit: 7200 backgrounder.restart_interval_in_minutes: 480 backgrounder.restrict_serial_collections_to_site_level: true backgrounder.search_index_verification.enabled: true backgrounder.sheet_image_api.max_age: 240 backgrounder.sleep_interval: 10 backgrounder.sort_jobs_by_run_time_history_observable_hours: -1 backgrounder.sort_jobs_by_type_schedule_boundary_heuristics_milliSeconds: -1 backgrounder.timeout_tasks: refresh_extracts, increment_extracts, subscription_notify, single_subscription_notify backgrounder.tomcat.threads: 4 backgrounder.urlprefix: backgrounder backgrounder.vmopts: -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -Xmx512m
Note that Tableau Support don’t like you to edit config files manually, they recommend that you use the tabadmin set commands to change any parameters. They might have to change that recommendation when we see Tableau Server on Linux.
For more about .templ, Ruby & properties files check out this from Tamas Foldi.
Here are some of the things that can be problematic with the backgrounder.
A common configuration in a clustered environment is to dedicate one of your worker nodes to the backgrounder processes. This means you can dial up the number of backgrounders and let them do their stuff without worrying about any impact on other processes. This is one of the most common performance recommendations from Tableau support.
You can also get a lot of info out of the Postgres DB relating to backgrounder usage and performance. Nelson Davis has posted a guide to getting started here.
Ok so here are a bunch of improvements I’d like to see to the topic of backgrounders and extract management. I know some of this will drop in upcoming releases and some of these problems have been solved with custom solutions at some customer sites.
Alerting – Tableau Server doesn’t alert (email / IM / SMS) when a task fails. This means you’ll need to set up external monitoring to detect issues. I know Tableau are on this though so expect to see it in an upcoming version. Some people in the community have also coded their own solutions to this problem but it really should be native functionality.
Control per site – We segregate our dev / test / prod user environments using sites , all on the same server. We run 8 backgrounder processes on that server, which are shared across the tasks on all sites. As an administrator I’d really like to be able to bind backgrounder processes to specific sites. For example, 2 backgrounders on each of dev & test sites, then the other 4 dedicated to the production site. That would ensure production tasks always have enough resource to be able to execute on time.
Control per process – I’d like to be able to stop / pause / mess with individual backgrounder processes easily. It is possible – see this from Toby Erkson, but it would be good to have this as part of an administrator console or something.
Control per type / size / pattern of extracts – It would be good if I could dedicate specific backgrounder processes to particular extracts based on their characteristics. In particular I’d like to allocate one backgrounder to all the extracts that take less than 1 minute to complete. Or even use this to reward users that show diligence with their extract management by dynamically prioritizing incremental refreshes or extracts that have a low failure rate.
Better metrics – I’d like to see exactly how much CPU is taken up by a particular backgrounder process or task / schedule or per project. This would be useful for chargeback.
Dynamic reprioritisation – I love all my users. But in particular the ones that take good care of their extract refreshes. I’d like Tableau to be able to dynamically increase the priority of tasks that complete quickly, are incremental and that have a low failure rate. The message being, if you want your stuff to get the best slice of available resource then help us out with best practice.65
Disable run now – We’ve had some issues with the “run now” option that allows users to kick off an extract refresh on-demand using the UI. In particular we’ve seen some trigger-happy users bring our server down by hammering on the run now option multiple times. I’d like to disable that or maybe throttle it somehow.
Better guidelines from Tableau – The documentation from Tableau isn’t great in this area.
I have an 8 core 128GB server and run 8 backgrounders with no capacity issues. And I know of other organisations running way more than that. According to this doc I should be running between 2-4. That would be some serious under-utilization of the server. I’d like to see some clearer recommendations, maybe taking into account the variety of use cases that I’ve seen in other big enterprise deployments.
OK that’s all for now. This post could have been more detailed but I figure that I’ll get some valuable inputs from the community that will help me expand it. Actually in the time I was writing this, Mike Roberts was doing the same – check his post for some excellent info.
Cheers, Paul
Hi,
Guess what this post is about – yes TABLE CALCULATIONS…. haha. No chance. Talk to Jonathan Drummey about those. This is of course yet more info that I hope will help you guys set up a dream Enterprise Tableau deployment.
Today we are gonna talk about Environments – i.e. what Tableau environments should you create in your organisation to give your team the best chance of success and keep your lovely users happy?
As always, I’m not saying this is THE way to do it. There are tons of great setups out there. I’ll just tell you what we have. Feel free to suggest better methods in the comments.
This section is concerned with environments that you will provide for your Tableau users to do their work. Typically this will follow the standard Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) environment definitions, but there are a few things you can do to add extra options for your users.
These are the environments our users have at their disposal:
Providing these environments gives users crucial options and flexibility. Your Tableau service will most likely serve many different business areas and teams, each with different practices for content development and release management. Some teams will rigorously follow Systems Development Lifecycle (SDLC) processes, creating content in development, promoting to User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and then eventually to Production. Other teams are totally happy to change content directly in Production, as and when they feel like it.
Crucially we don’t mandate what our users do, it’s a self-service model and so long as they follow their own due-diligence and governance procedures then that’s cool with me. The important thing is that we give them options to work with Tableau in the way that they want. If they break anything then they know it’s down to them.
The scratch environment is an interesting concept. It started with good intentions but realistically not many people are using it. So it looks like we might bin that.
Note that we use Tableau sites to segregate our environments.
This is different from the above user-facing environments. These are the environments that your team uses for the service you provide. Obviously all this costs money in terms of hardware procurement and usage, depending on the spec you choose.
So that’s what we are lucky enough to have. It’s not perfect but it allows us to give our users a ton of flexibility in how they use Tableau, and also my own team always has a place to test new releases, plan upgrades and help Tableau with their pre-release programmes.
Interested to see what the community has in terms of environments. Let me know in the comments. Remember there are a load of other posts on this blog about Enterprise Tableau considerations.
Cheers, Paul
Hello again,
Here’s another post for you Tableau Server admins. Now Tableau Server runs on Windows. One day I’m sure those fine Tableau devs will release a Linux Server(!). In fact they’d better hurry up or Tamas Foldi is likely to beat them to it!
But Windows it is so we have to deal with it. This is a short post which provides some links to useful utilities that every Tableau Server admin should have in her or his arsenal.
Disclaimer – I’m no Windows Server Admin. If you are, or if you know of great alternatives to these tools then feel free to offer your professional solutions in the comments.
Baretail
One of the most annoying things with Windows is the absence of a native ‘tail‘ command unlike UNIX. So if you want to see what Tableau Server is up to when you’re working on it then use something like Baretail to view the log files as they get updated.
The basic version of Baretail is free. It’s easy to use and does the job. It’s also a single executable file so no need to install. I use it a lot.
Who knew config changes caused worker re-installs?
I’d recommend tailing tabadmin.log every time you log onto your server, regardless of whether there’s an issue or not. You’ll learn a ton about the regular behaviour of the application. See this example screenshot here. I didn’t know that every time you hit OK on the “Configure Tableau Server” GUI then the Primary server goes off and uninstalls the tabsvc service on each worker and then re-installs it. Interesting to know that, and picked up by tailing tabadmin.log with Baretail.
Process Explorer
Chances are you’re all familiar with Windows Task Manager which is the native utility used for viewing process activity on your server. Trouble is, it’s pretty basic and hasn’t evolved too much since it first came out.
So instead I use Process Explorer. Has a lot more functionality and is very easy to use. In this screenshot you can see how the tabspawn.exe process has started a number of other processes, whereas the webserver (httpd.exe) runs independently and not under the control of tabspawn.
Xperf
Xperf is a handy tool for logging all sorts of detailed operating system metrics. We’ve used it to analyse behaviour of Tableau Server processes in terms of CPU utilisation, memory use, disk and other process behaviour.
Not a tool that you can leave running on your system though as it generates shed loads of output and will burn your disk space pretty quickly. So use sparingly.
Fiddler
Fiddler is a cool application and really useful. It’s primary use is to capture information from programs that use http. I’ve used it to spot issues with the webserver on the Tableau Server or to analyse some of the protocol information for various web sessions on the server.
For example, there was an issue with SSLv3 as per this article. Tableau support ensured us that Server would use the TLS protocol instead, but we had no way of knowing for sure. We used Fiddler to analyse the http traffic and confirm the protocol that was being used. Nice.
I like Wireshark. But then again I like anything with shark in the name. I’m a serious shark fan.
Wireshark
Simply put, if you want to see what’s going on with the network on your Tableau Server then fire up Wireshark. It’ll tell you a lot of info including highly detailed network packet information. It also has pretty nifty colour coding for different packet types which makes usage easy for non-network folks like me.
Windows Performance Monitor is another handy tool. It collects a whole load of system metrics such as memory use, CPU etc and creates handy data sets that can be easily visualised (with Tableau of course!). In fact perfmon data is one of the first places we look when diagnosing root cause of issues.
I’ve never used this tool, but it comes recommended by a Server admin pal of mine. Glen from Interworks knows as much about everyone’s least favourite OS as anyone I’ve ever met. He’s also a Tableau Server expert so that’s a good enough recommendation for me.
So there you go. A handful of utilities that hopefully you won’t have to use too often. Of course the best way to not have to use these is to avoid issues in the first place. You can help yourself with good Tableau Server monitoring and by ensuring you take backups.
Cheers, Paul
Hi
So you want more about how to build that awesome enterprise Tableau service? No? Oh. Well tough – I’m gonna crack some more knowledge eggs on yo ass. That’s what the kids say these days isn’t it?
This time, it’s a big one. How to build a team to support that Tableau environment. As with most of my posts there are many ways it can be done but I’m going to describe what I’ve got in place. And it’s working pretty well even if I say so myself. Ner ner…
This post is going to concentrate on people-related aspects of your support team, rather than technologies. There may be another post on the way about that depending on whether anyone bothers to read this one other than Mrs Ninja.
Before I kick off, I am aware that most of these IT service posts don’t have the sexy factor of all those other cool blogs about Level of Detail (LOD) calcs, viz design or those games that people keep creating in Tableau. BUT – if you want to get Tableau to take off in a massive Enterprise then these are the things you’ll need to consider. Get one of them badly wrong and your dream could become a nightmare. So I don’t care if you don’t think it’s glamorous.
I’m gonna assume that you’ve already been through the aggro of fighting for precious headcount and that you have what you have. Hopefully that will be a good few people, more likely it will be n – 1 where n = the bare minimum needed… You’re just gonna have to accept that – you’ll never get enough bodies. If you work somewhere that gives you tons of people – give me a call…. (just kidding boss).
A few options here. We’ve located the whole Level 3 (see later for L1 / L2 / L3 roles) team in London. The main reason for that is that I’m here, so is my manager and the infrastructure is also in London. That gives us better oversight as we get this thing off the ground.
You may wish to consider splitting your team across regions if that is the company strategy. This can give advantages that you have close to 24 hour L3 coverage. It’s great if you get an towards the end of UK time, and are able to then hand off to your USA team, who then run with it and resolve while you’re enjoying forty winks.
In the future the demands of your service may determine where you locate additional people. Much of this may be down to your company strategy, where there may be a preference for lower-cost locations as opposed to paying the big bucks to people to come to London or New York etc.
But you should also be mindful of where your service usage is growing. Using our Custom Admin Views (post on it’s way about them) we can see exactly what regions our Server is being hit from and where our Desktop users are located. If you see adoption in a particular region going through the roof then maybe you should consider recruiting in that locale? We got a tremendous response from our Singapore user base when we went live. They LOVE a bit of Tableau. But when they are online, we are asleep so they get delayed response to queries. I should probably put someone out there to give them better service.
It’s not all gravy though. Managing remote teams is difficult and takes a lot of organisation.
I’m sure you get the drift. You may not have much choice in location, but then again you might…
Typically large organisations will have a standard Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) model of support roles and responsibilities. To summarise.
More info on these roles and responsibilities here.
It’s really important to get this working well. An efficiently functioning L2 will come to be your team’s wingman, taking the pressure off your engineers. We’re lucky to have a good L1 & L2 setup, so only approx 10-20% of incidents ever filter all the way down to my L3 team to fix. L2 can usually deal with most.
Your L1 & L2 teams will tend to operate exactly by the book, so make sure they have appropriate process and documentation to allow them to succeed. They’ll also probably be supporting more applications than your precious Tableau Server so bear that in mind. Yes some people actually work on other applications not just Tableau – the fools.
This is a topic that can make or break your service. As far as I’m concerned the only option for a big organisation, where you’ll never have enough people is to go Self-Service.
That means – my team doesn’t create visualisations for anyone. Users don’t submit tickets to us for us to create their vizzes. Why?
So we make sure users know this is a self-service model, and a true Data Visualisation Centre of Excellence. Check this post for how I constructed our CoE. I’ll be doing another post later on how this service model hangs together.
In summary, because we don’t create vizzes or datasources for users, we have time to concentrate on the extra value items that differentiate us from other IT services.
So what type of Tableau work will your team need to cover? We kinda bucket our tasks into the following groups
So you’ll have to decide if you want each person in your team to be able to cover the whole spectrum of tasks, or do you want to have specialists? I’m lucky enough to have a cracking team, where my girls and guys can swap between any of these buckets with relative ease. It’s still cool to dedicate one person to user work and the other to engineering for a time though, but be aware there may be an impact when one is on holiday.
We have chosen to keep the training programme operated by one person though, as this has allowed us to build up a more consistent programme that can be tweaked and refined.
So because we empower users to create their own content, we can dive head first into all this juicy work. It’s interesting for us, and users love it.
Some other activities my team perform as part of our service. I class these as the glossy items as I don’t see any other IT services doing them. And the reaction we get from our users is phenomenal.
Quint was certifiable, just not in Tableau
Try and get your team certified. You want to be seen as the experts then you need to wear the badge. While certification certainly isn’t a substitute for on-the-job experience, it does give that air of confidence to your users. It’s also fun to do.
Senior management will also like to demonstrate to the business that your Tableau service is manned by highly skilled, vendor certified technicians. So more of a branding exercise but still very much worth doing…
For more info on Tableau Certification check this out.
One of the things that tends to happen with Tableau is that *some* of your users will totally fall for the tool. Just like I did and many of you out there. These are people you should be aware of as they are heading down that path to wanting to make Tableau their whole career.
Keep an eye on users that are spending lots of time with the tool, have seriously engaged with your mission or that have been demonstrating great expertise. They could be potentially interested in moving to work for your team. I get asked regularly by my user base if there are any jobs going in my team. That’s obviously cos I’m an amazing boss and we have it totally going on – who can blame them. It’s got nothing to do with Tableau…
But seriously, rather than going out to market and risking getting the wrong person in, the answer to your resource issues could be right under your nose.
Let your team express themselves (with data, not paint)
I think it’s really important to allow your staff to express themselves. Data visualisation is a creative art, and allowing your team a free mind is critical to their creativity, enjoyment and success.
I make sure my team know that I’m all for them blogging internally & externally, interacting on social media, building contacts and going out to our user base proactively to help. If they see a viz on our server that they think they can improve then they just go for it. If they want to dive more into a particular user’s requirements then just do it. Wanna write a blog – do it already!
This applies to contractors & consultant staff also. I want consultants to leave having developed into more able technicians from having worked with my service – I don’t regard them as hired gun resources to squeeze work from, they are valued contributors to our mission. I find that consultancies really appreciate this approach and it has led to us building some great relationships with consultancies and individuals alike.
I’ve heard you even have to give your team days off. They’re called “holidays”. Yeah I know, it’s a legal thing apparently. Won’t catch on.
I actually operate a model where I swap out consultants every 6-8 months regardless of how well they are doing with us. I do this because it is useful to get a fresh perspective on our environment, with each new person bringing something different to the table. I also do this for the benefit of the consultant themselves. No-one wants to be stuck in a single role for 18 months, so I like consultants that work for me to work hard, learn lots, then take those skills away to their new roles. Again this is really appreciated by the management at consultancies as part of our strategic partnerships.
We’re only human…
You know what users hate? They hate it when they have to submit a ticket or email to some faceless system, that gets picked up and processed by someone they’ve never met, in some region thousands of miles away. It feels, well, inhuman.
Not in my team. We’re all about being as human as possible. My team all have their individual profile pages on our community site. They have blogs. They have photos and backstories of their career and interests. They advertise their social media presence. They are contactable and approachable. People know who they are, what they look like and what makes them tick. When you deal with my team you are getting a proper service, from real people that you know care.
We get much better user engagement like this and as a result my team has gotten to know some users really well.
Ah everyone’s favourite subject. So Tableau is great right, but it’s still only a piece of software. And as such you’re gonna get issues. So you need to handle them correctly.
Firstly, make sure you’re utilising Level 2 support for your changes and handling your incidents. This will take so much heat off your Level 3 team. L2 should be able to do all of your paperwork, manage the communications to your users, and even perform the majority of standard changes like upgrades and config changes.
We always make sure we over-communicate on changes and incidents. We involve power users and get them really ingrained into what we are doing and why we are doing it. Your power users will love to know why something broke, what Tableau are doing about it and when that fix will be implemented because they want to really understand the application. Often they come up with good suggestions as to what you can do to help prevent a recurrence. So get them involved.
I’m not going to go into too much detail on this, there’s a ton of ITIL related reading you can do. The message is – you can get a lot of positives from handling a negative situation well. Show empathy to your users for the impact they have experienced, show you care, don’t hide anything and be totally transparent.
To give great support you have to have great people. People that are skilled, passionate and dedicated. People that care about the service they provide and your mission. If you don’t have great people then don’t mess about – get someone else. You’ll be the one judged by users and management, so there’s no room for sentiment.
I’m lucky. I’ve had really great people. So a big thanks to Jake, Carl, Andy, Emma, Jonathan & Dave for helping to build and run our service!
OK that’s it for this one. There may well be an update to this post as it’s such a huge subject that I’m sure I’ve missed some things.
Now if you’ll excuse me my team seems to have gone to the pub… Err guys? GUYS???
Hello there,
More tips coming to help you build that dream Tableau Server setup in your global Enterprise…. This time we focus on training.
Training is a critical subject. It won’t take long before someone asks you about your strategy or what you offer so you’ll need to ensure you have a professional sounding answer. Here’s what I offer my users. Hopefully some of this will be useful.
Training gets pride of place on our community site
Before I get into the specific offerings there are a few things you need to consider.
So before I describe what we offer, you’ll notice that we have snappy names for each of these offerings. It’s not just “Tableau Training”. Much of Tableau’s success is down to stellar marketing and branding – take “Tableau Dr.” for example.
So make sure you think about what you are offering, how it will be perceived and how you can maximise adoption. A memorable and consistent name is key here. Each offering also has a nice-looking one pager in our Sharepoint slide library and an appropriate user-facing page / description on our community site so that we can give people all the info at a moments notice. The more effort you put into branding the better things will be.
You’ll also find that any of these offerings are easily transferable to teams / services that may be related to your area so there are a ton of collaboration opportunities here.
If you’re like me then you’ll have users all over the globe. That means timezone aggro. You’ll generally need to double up most of your offerings. We are based in London so we have an early session for Asia/Pacific and an afternoon session for Europe/Africa/USA. Users will really appreciate this extra effort.
It’s important not to get fixated on how many people are attending your sessions. Sometimes we get 3 people, sometimes we get dozens. Don’t worry about it. Training 3 people is better than none. And often the smaller sessions have better engagement.
You’re gonna get a LOT of requests for training. Make sure you control the schedule. Don’t be scared to tell users when the next scheduled session is and that they can join it. Don’t be scheduling things on demand of users or you’ll lose control completely. If training is regular and consistent then users will settle into a pattern and you’ll be able to manage your team’s time much more efficiently.
Training gets a lot of focus with senior management. You (or your manager) will get asked plenty about how many people you’re training and from what business area / region they are.
As we are all data people it’s much better to SHOW the execs the data rather than tell them you’re just “doing loads of training”. We have several Tableau vizzes that track the attendance at each of our training offerings. We then blend that with staff / hierarchy data to allow detailed reporting on all of the modules. That makes a much better impression.
For example just checking our viz now I can see that my team has done 545 Tableau Dr. Sessions this year, covering 277 different individuals. That’s almost 550 man hours of training on Dr. Sessions alone. Right there, evidenced and visualised. That makes a much bigger impression with the folks at the top.
Tracking our training…
All this training can be a real time-burner. I’m sure some of you are thinking why don’t you just record the sessions and chuck the video online. And we get asked that. But never under-estimate the value of Instructor-Led sessions over videos. Our sessions are interactive, dynamic, enjoyable and make the users feel valued. They can be funny, and go in different directions according to the particular vibe in play. So don’t cave in to laziness, make sure the sessions happen and that they have that human touch.
So those are the general things to be aware of. I’ll now describe the specific options we have for training at my organisation.
I love self learning. Getting stuck into a manual, book or video. Or just firing up Tableau and seeing where it takes me. And you’ll get a lot of users that are the same. It’s always great to allow the self-learners to flourish, and it has the added benefit of not using your team resources.
You’ll get asked these questions hundreds of times, so make sure that you have all the relevant materials easily accessible on your community page.
Our 101 page is top of the Community site in a super easy-to-find location. We refer our users to
This is generally more than enough for your average self-learner to get stuck into.
Users operate at different levels of ability and interest. So it is important that your training caters for that. It also looks great if you can demonstrate an end to end understanding of training. In addition to the self-learning pipeline, we offer the following.
This is my main training programme for Tableau Desktop users. It consists of 7 modules, each conducted once a month, with a session in the morning to hit APAC users and one in the afternoon to cover EMEA/USA users.
Our training syllabus
Content is self-explanatory from the headings, but module 7 may seem odd. This is actually a pretty important consideration in large organisations where no two Tableau deployments will be the same. There will be organisation-specific nuances or considerations in many aspects of using Tableau and our place is no different. Much of this focuses on purchasing / onboarding, getting started, and change / incident management procedures, often a source of confusion for users.
The Doc is in!
Ok so you all know these. The famous one-on-one consultancy time that Tableau offer at conferences. That’s all this really is, but we find that our users love the dedicated time to discuss whatever Tableau related topics they want. Many often come back for repeated sessions and some are almost data hypochondriacs!
The Dr. Sessions have been a real success. People at high-pressure organisations like Investment Banks, especially senior folk, really understand and appreciate the importance of that dedicated, individual, focused consultancy time. Time is the most precious commodity in such an organisation and you’ll find that you get some serious kudos for these.
When you’re at conference and see people gagging for Tableau Dr. Sessions, imagine what that would be like at your own organisation. Super-cool aint it?
This offering is really cool. These are monthly Webinar sessions, again one for APAC timezone and one for EMEA/USA timezone. They are conducted by experts from Tableau, tailored to UBS requirements.
Subjects have included
Tableau In Focus
Again, the fact Tableau are prepared to conduct these for us not only gives us valuable extra learning offerings but makes my users feel even more special than I know they are! We get great feedback, with users thrilled that we have such a good relationship with Tableau. That all gives them confidence in our service, and that is critical.
OK so this is an interesting one. We get a lot of senior folk asking for Tableau training. That’s very encouraging, obviously, but your average MD isn’t gonna sit through an hour Webex on LOD calcs.
So – what we do is our “Tableau Executive Track”. That’s a 1hr session, ideally in person with my laptop where we plan to cover the following.
In reality we often don’t get 30 seconds into this agenda before it is taken somewhere else, at the subject’s discretion. That’s cool – it’s what senior folk do and you need to be prepared for it. But it’s also important to come armed with an agenda to show you have a plan. Don’t just rock up and say “whadda you wanna know?” – you’ll get eaten alive.
Tableau Sr. Management Training
This is a really popular training offering, with many seniors having attended or planning to attend. It shows we are putting a great deal of thought into our training and that we are flexible enough to adapt to the variety of users we have.
Sometimes we get asked, “I’ve been sent this dashboard but I have no idea how to use it”. Well that’s NOT something we assist with. Our service is totally self-serve and it’s the responsibility of the dashboard author to
This is NOT down to us. We spend a lot of time policing content to make sure that authors are mindful of this as a dashboard that is hard to understand can adversely affect perception of the tool / service as a whole.
So that’s what we offer. Aint it a lot? And boy is it important to the success of your service. Training can make or break a service and between you, me and the whole Internet – a lack of training can be used as an excuse for not engaging, or not performing. It’s rare but it happens.
Training your users should be enjoyable. If you find that it is becoming a pain then take a step back, consult some of your power users and modify your offerings.
In the time I was proof-reading this post the excellent Carl Allchin, who implemented much of our training when on site with us, posted some of his own thoughts on the Information Lab blog. Check them out. Also a big thanks to Andy Pick who has delivered dozens of sessions for our users.
As always I’m happy to jump on a call and discuss any of this. Now if you’ll excuse me I have a training session to deliver…
Cheers, Paul
