What to name your Tableau Server?

Posted on October 18, 2017 by paulbanoub

Hello all. Yes, contrary to popular belief, I did indeed survive Tableau Conference 2017. I’ll admit it was a close thing, but I got through it!

Now back to business..

This one all started with a tweet from my good pal, the Wizard of Excel (and Tableau genius) Mr Dan Harrison (@danosirra) who was wondering what to name his Tableau server host.

This awakened the server admin in me (not that it’s ever asleep).. It also made me question Dan’s taste in music.

An example being…

And this is the point. Server naming is critical in any organisation, large or small.

Picture the situation – you get woken up at 2am by an alert or a call from an operator – server “superman” is down. Fine if you’re experienced and know the environment inside out, but what if you’ve only just joined the company. You know the servers are named after superheroes, but that’s it. Was the production server superman or spiderman? Or was it WonderWoman? Do you need to take action? It’s not clear and you need to dig into a server inventory system to get more info, and that takes time. And you’re new, so you can’t remember the URL for the inventory system.

You assume superman is your production server. But it’s not reachable via console, and you need to call someone to get into the datacenter to fix it. So you call the hardware team – sure they’ll go in, but they need to know if the server is in the London or the Birmingham datacenter? Errrr…

So you dispatch Server 5’O to fix the box, and then the next day you find out it’s a development machine and could wait. What a waste of time.

So you get the problem here. It’s very tempting to name servers after Simpsons characters or animals (I’d choose sharks obviously), but those names convey no organisational information and as such, are useless.

So what should you do?

There are tons of different naming conventions you can use. Here’s one that I like

When I get that call in the middle of the night I (or the hardware technician) will want to know..

Where is the server?
Is it production, Disaster Recovery, UAT or development?
What application is it? Tableau, obviously.
Which worker of my Tableau cluster is it?
What operating system is it?

So I get called and am told server lnpwtsw3.company.com is down. Let me think..

ln – London
p – Production
w – Windows
ts – Tableau Server
w3 – Worker 3

And with that info, I know it needs acting on now, which platform admin to call if it’s an OS issue, and where to send the hardware technician if it needs physically addressing. I also know which worker it is so what the potential impact to my cluster is.

Yes the server name is a little harder to remember, but that soon comes and it is possible to create a DNS alias to reflect a friendlier name if needed. There’s also a balance to be had in terms of character count etc.

Another example – this time server name is lndwtsw1

ln – London
d – Development
w – Windows
ts – Tableau Server
w1 – Worker 1

Fine, that’s development. I’ll go back to sleep and deal with it in the morning.

So as you can see, it’s pretty important. Not just for me and my Tableau environment, what if you’re a server admin in charge of 5000 servers across the globe? This needs to be right!

Anyway, that’s it. Pretty simple. For the record, Dan made his choice…

See you next time, Paul

Data driven interviewing with Tableau

Posted on July 6, 2017 by paulbanoub

Continuing the series of posts where I explain how we are building an enterprise grade Tableau Centre of Excellence.

Here at Vizninja towers we pride ourselves on knowing Tableau & data. After all, we need to be able to add value and help users with their myriad queries.

So when we get the chance to hire, it is critical that we get the correct people. People with great skills in Tableau, data & visual analytics. People that can tell stories and make data come to life. People who want to help others see and understand their data. And being a data driven team we use data and visualisation to help us make the selection.

Our interview process goes like this.

An initial screening call with the Agile BI service manager (that’s me!)
A technical interview with the team
An exercise involving Tableau Public
A final chat with the big boss (that’ll be me one day)

Some more detail on a couple of these steps.

The Technical Interview

We have a series of technical questions that the team asks each candidate. The questions are split between Tableau Server and Tableau Desktop and also categorised in terms of complexity – e.g. Level 1, Level 2 & Level 3, (see here) with the more complex questions being at L3 level. So I wait until my team are in a bad mood and then I let them off their leash at the candidate….

Our interview viz. Created by @jakesviz

Click the image to get a better view of the tooltips. Apologies if they’re not so clear. Here’s what some of them look like. So we can see the exact question asked, points achieved and any comments.

On the dashboard, you can see the questions asked, the max points available per question and then the points attained per category and complexity. At the end we spit out a KPI that gives us some indication of a candidate’s capability. Note that a low score doesn’t necessarily indicate that a candidate is unsuitable. Often we see people who are super-skilled in Tableau Desktop but not experienced in Server (as in this case). A few weeks with the team will soon change that though. Our job is to create all-rounders in all aspects of Tableau.

So if the data checks out then the candidate moves on to the next stage.

The Tableau Public Exercise

For the next test we ask a candidate to choose a dataset from these public datasets and then create a viz on Tableau Public. The candidate then presents their viz to us and we look for the following

Good visual analytics best practice
Ability to create an engaging story and develop insight
Structured design process and ability to justify design choices

And if they’re really unlucky then @jakesviz will download the workbook and rip it to bits in front of them! Yes we are looking to see if you’ve commented your calculated fields!

Here’s what Jakub Jaros came up with..

https://public.tableau.com/profile/jakub.jaros#!/vizhome/SignigicantVolcanicEruptions/Main

Nice work huh? We thought so. So now you know where to go for your volcano information. This is a really important part of the interview process as the candidate presents their work to us and it can lead to discussion, debate and even argument. But it really gives a sense of whether someone loves dataviz and you sure need that if you want to work for me. We plan to add some data points to this stage so that we can come up with a final rating for each candidate.

After this, it’s a final chat with the big boss and hopefully a role with the team. And that’s when the fun really starts!

This approach has really resonated with senior management and as a result we are helping several other teams to adopt a similar process.

So there you are. That’s how we ensure we have the correct people to deliver a great service. Feedback appreciated in the comments.

Cheers, Paul

Meet the Penguins!

Posted on June 21, 2017 by paulbanoub

OK here we go. Iron Viz competition time. I don’t viz that much so pleased to dust off Tableau Desktop and have a go. This competition is all about the natural world. A very interesting theme for me being a massive nature fan.

1. The Idea

I love nature. Thinking of a theme I reached back into childhood memories and for some reason I thought of long afternoons with my family at the zoo. Aside from the usual animals we always used to make a beeline for the penguins, something that still happens when I take my own family to the zoo. Everyone loves penguins!

However, I don’t think that many people know just how many different flavours of penguin there are. They live in varied locations, come in a host of different sizes and looks and not all of them live in cold countries. They do all stink though.

So I thought I’d use Penguins of the World as my subject for this viz. And here it is.

Go take a look at the viz!

2. Data

I got the data from a single source- https://seaworld.org/en/animal-info/animal-infobooks/penguin/

References to sited data is always good to see

Although I didn’t conduct any lengthy data validation exercise I was given some degree of confidence that the website has a detailed references section, siting the data sources. That’s always good to see and something that is mandatory in scientific papers and such like.

Now there’s tons of penguin data available out there. But I really didn’t have the time to spend days looking for that perfect data source. I also didn’t want to spend days transforming the data before I started vizzing so I settled on this one pretty quickly. Then it was a copy and paste into Excel and I was off.

Always be on the lookout for good images to incorporate into your viz

One thing I did like was the fact that this page had some cool drawings of each penguin species. That instantly got me thinking of using them as Tableau shapes. It’s always a good idea to be on the lookout for images and drawings that can you can incorporate into your visualisations.

3. Viz Design

Now I’m probably not the only person in this competition to be heavily influenced by the master of these kind of visualisations, Sir Jonni of Walker. (@jonni_walker). And with that I thought I’d steal like an artist and try to emulate him.

Key design choices were to use a black background, with plenty of large images and the use of BANs (Big Assed Numbers) as callouts. Things that Jonni does all the time and that really create a visual impact. I also wanted to utilise the penguin images as a “penguin picker” to create some interactivity.

I also wanted a map to be a main feature of the viz as maps are not only informative, but visually striking, highly customisable and also act as a canvas on which to overlay images (in oceans etc.). I had a problem at first with the fact that Antarctica was one of the main locations, and that meant the bottom of the map had a straight edge, which looked ugly. This meant the map would have to meet the bottom of the viz to draw attention away from the abrupt edge.

The IUCN scale

I was pretty pleased with the highlighted IUCN status of each species. The icons looked nice and almost acted as a traffic light theme. Jonni thought they should be greyscale but I overruled him. Pfft – what does he know anyway?

In terms of Tableau content, only a couple of charts to show population, location, height and weight; but that was fine. It didn’t really need anything else.

I also wanted to include a section on famous penguins but it ended up overloading the viz and spoiling the theme. Although it did make me smile. Bonus question – can you name all of these famous penguins?

How many of these famous penguins can you name?

I also considered the use of an embedded YouTube video but decided against it.

I had fun choosing the title font, something that I think can make a huge difference to the viewer if chosen well. Regular fonts were somehow boring, and fonts with penguin characters looked too cluttered. I finally managed to settle on an Austin Powers style font, and then had the idea of alternating the colours to give that penguiny feel. I like it!

In the end I think the final result was ok. However this wasn’t one that I enjoyed. See below.

4. Challenges

This was my first viz in a while. I’ve spent the last 3 years knee-deep in Tableau Server and have a crazy busy job building a Tableau Centre of Excellence, supporting thousands of demanding users so I’m the first one to admit I don’t have the Tableau Desktop skills of people like Adam Crahen, Neil Richards, Pooja Gandhi et al.

The standard of skill out there in the community is crazy good. And that really was the main challenge. I found this viz a fairly stressful experience, it made me feel like a newbie all over again, simply because I’d be putting this out there against some stunning competition. I even considered not entering for a while. But hey, that’s not what the Tableau community is all about so I thought I’d have a go at it.

As mentioned earlier, I was deliberately trying to emulate Jonni’s style. Now that proved to be pretty difficult. I managed to create something reasonable, and fairly quickly, and began thinking to myself that hey this is a piece of cake, Jonni who?? But then it got harder. My ideas began to dry up and I found myself staring at an okay-ish viz but being unable to take that next step to make it better. Felt like vizzers block.

And that’s when I realised that the people who create these REALLY good vizzes have a lot of inherent natural skills and imagination that folks like me lack. So I gave Jonni a call and asked his advice. He came back with a number of suggestions, none of them earth-shattering, but much more subtle and delicate. Making the map larger, bringing highlight colours out from the penguin plumage were a couple of suggestions that made a huge difference to the impact of the viz. My point here is that the real geniuses of visual design have these thoughts occur naturally and without significant effort, folks like me have to learn them, or at least work a little harder than some others.

But hey, IronViz (and any vizzing) is all about learning. So I’m good with that.

Another challenge was that the Tableau part of this was pretty easy. That’s obviously great and what we want from our favourite application, but in terms of this viz I spent more time in image manipulation tools than in Tableau. And that really did detract from enjoyment. Come on Tableau! Make it harder for us to complete our vizzes!

5. Analysis & Story

So what can we take from this story? Here are some of the key observations that Tableau has allowed me to glean from the dataset.

All penguins live in the southern hemisphere, and some in hot countries
There are some seriously big populations, although some are endangered
They range from massive to teeny tiny
Main predators are Leopard Seals & Sea Lions
There are not one, but two penguin days in the calendar
- Penguin Awareness Day (20th January)
- World Penguin Day (25th April)

So that’s it. I hope you enjoy the visualisation. If you do then please consider voting for me in the IronViz competition. And thanks to Jonni Walker for providing advice for this viz. Top man.

Good luck to all the other entries this year. Especially blinders like this from Ken Flerlage. – The Killing Fields – Viz / Blog.

Hmm. After all that writing I could do with a chocolate biscuit. Now which one……

Regards, Paul

What we got wrong building our Tableau service

Posted on May 2, 2017 by paulbanoub

I spend a lot of time talking to other companies about how to put together a decent Tableau Centre of Excellence. And that’s cool. I love to help people and I also learn a ton from all the other great setups out there.

But that also gets me thinking. We are far from perfect. And we made a whole lot of mistakes on the way to building our service. So instead of talking about the good stuff we did, I thought I’d highlight what I think we got wrong.

So in no particular order of importance, here are our top mistakes

Onboarding

So you’ve done the demo, shown the capabilities of Tableau and your audience is wowed. They want it and they want it NOW! So how do you get them from wanting to having?

Well we didn’t do so well. Our purchasing is handled by another team and the process is fairly complicated. Our mistake was not building a solid enough relationship with the purchasing team early on and making an effort to understand the points of the process that could be improved. We kind of just let them get on with it when we could have offered more assistance. This meant that on occasion users had to wait up to 2 months before they actually got their licence! And sometimes that cost us users, who gave up during the process.

Eventually we got together and helped the purchasing team out. And now things are a lot better. My advice – if you see a team you have a dependency on are struggling, then speak to them and help them out. Sounds obvious, but on this occasion we didn’t.

Setting Expectations

I spend a lot of time talking to users, often at a senior level, asking them to feedback on their experience with Tableau. On the whole it’s great stuff that comes back, but occasionally I used to get surprised with users informing me that their experience was poor. Tableau didn’t do what they wanted, it was inflexible and hard to use.

That didn’t sound like the Tableau I know and love. So I did some more research and it turned out that the users who didn’t like Tableau were trying to get it to do something that it wasn’t designed for. Now that’s fine if you’re Allan Walker or Noah Salvaterra but most of my users aren’t that level – in fact few people are. And of course that meant the users were getting frustrated.

I think the comment that really resonated was “Tableau? That’s Excel online isn’t it?”. Er – NO IT ISN’T!

The problem was obvious. Users thought Tableau was something it wasn’t. And naturally they would get a degraded experience. So we created a document that clearly states what Tableau is good at, and what it isn’t good at. We make users read this doc when they sign up for the service so they know exactly what they are getting.

This was very successful and really cut down the instances of poor feedback.

Some related posts on this subject from Dan Murray, Matt Francis & Peter Gilks

Training from the Get-Go

I’m a self-learner. So is my team, and most of the people I work with. I’m sure you are as well, that’s why you’re here reading this. And as a result I expect others to be the same. And for the self-learner, the world of Tableau is great. Tons of bloggers, forums, help articles, Tweeters, online videos and all sorts of quality learning materials. It really is one of the strengths of Tableau IMHO.

So we created guides & 101 pages etc and told users to go and help themselves. And to be fair, some of them did. But not as many as we’d have liked. And as a result we got tons of newbie questions and consequently poor quality content on our server.

About 8 months into the service we decided to implement a structured, instructor led training programme, amongst other training initiatives. More details here. Much of the syllabus is covered by Tableau’s own online videos and other resources but for some reason, new users really responded to this structured course. As a result we saw a corresponding improvement in the quality of published content and a reduction in the basic level questions to the team. In hindsight we should have implemented this right at the start, rather than assuming everyone would be keen to self-learn.

Commercials

Much as I love Tableau, their commercial operation isn’t the most flexible. That’s not just my opinion, it has been mentioned in Gartner reports. As a result we’ve struggled to negotiate the most competitive packages that we could have done. There have been some valid reasons for that but I don’t think we put as much effort into resolving the related issues as we should have.

And that’s important. I don’t want to get the best price for the sake of it, in big enterprises there are a lot of competitive threats from other tools. If Tableau isn’t competitive with pricing then the people that make the technology decisions will be perfectly happy to rip it out and replace it with something else. Not what anyone wants.

Again much of this is down to relationship building. As our relationship with Tableau has grown, we’ve seen improvement in this area.

Gamification

I’m a big fan of gamification. It can really boost engagement and turn a good initiative into an awesome one. We’ve had a couple of half-hearted stabs at competitions, to try and get things going but there is so much more we can do. Hackathons, viz games, competitions and internal Iron Viz – we’ve got a ton of ideas but never made it happen yet.

I think that’s partially down to the wide geographical spread of my user base. It would be really hard to get people to show up in a particular location. Users are also insanely busy, would I be able to round up enough people to make it worthwhile? So lots of excuses and not a lot of achievement in this area. I’m open to ideas if you’ve got this one nailed.

That’s it for now. There may well be a part 2 to this as I’m sure there are more things that will come to mind as I cry myself to sleep thinking what a mess we’ve made of it all… 🙂

Thanks to the awesome Matt Francis for inspiring this post.

Happy vizzing, VN

Tableau Server – all about the… Backgrounder

Posted on May 5, 2016 by paulbanoub

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?

What is the backgrounder?

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).

Other files related to the backgrounder.

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).

Can I mess with it?

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.

What are the problems with the backgrounder?

Here are some of the things that can be problematic with the backgrounder.

Single Threaded – This means the backgrounder process can only run one thread at a time, a thread being a set of executable instructions that a process can perform. The upshot of this is that your backgrounder works through a queue of tasks one-by-one.

Latency – Due to the single threaded nature of backgrounder, you may see delays or ‘latency’. For example, if you have one backgrounder, and 2 tasks for it to perform at 2am, then task 2 will have to wait until task 1 has finished. If task 1 takes an hour then task 2 won’t start until 3am. This can be annoying for users that expect their data to be refreshed by a certain time.

Resource Intensive – The backgrounder can consume a significant amount of processing power (CPU) and input / output (I/O) on your server. This is dependent on the type of task it is performing. It’s not uncommon to see a backgrounder node consuming 100% CPU.

Other Stuff – The backgrounder process also does other stuff on Tableau Server that isn’t concerned with extract refreshes. For example – reaping extracts, checking disk space, synching Active Directory groups, rebuilding the search index etc. Bear that in mind when building your system. In reality these tasks don’t take up too much resource but they do take some and you should be aware.

Isolating the backgrounders

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.

Improvements I’d like to see

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

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Posted on April 19, 2016 by paulbanoub

Hi all,

OK here we go. Iron Viz competition time. My first viz in a long time, so it’s good to get back using Desktop again. The first competition this year is the Food Viz contest!

1. The Idea

So this one’s all about food. Plenty of potential ideas here but I love to deviate from the norm and go a little bit off the wall, a little bit unusual.

I got thinking about food. But then I thought what would we do if there was NO food? If we had nothing to grow. If all the crops in the world failed overnight. What would we do? That would be a pretty bad situation for sure and someone must have a backup plan. I’m in IT as you might know so I do love a good backup plan.

And it turns out there is one. The Svarlbad Global Seed Vault. Buried 130m into the Norwegian permafrost, this building looks more like a Bond villain’s hideout than a critical storage facility. Once I saw this website my mind started racing with questions and that’s a good sign that you’ve got a decent subject for a viz.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Go take a look at the viz!

2. Data

I got the data from 3 main sources.

Funding stats – https://www.croptrust.org/about-crop-trust/donors/funds-raised/
Main storage statistics – http://www.nordgen.org/sgsv/
Construction info – http://www.statsbygg.no/files/publikasjoner/ferdigmeldinger/671_SvalbardFrohvelv.pdf

The main seed stocks data

Plenty of detail in the data which gives some good potential for analysis. The main seed stats xls was pretty tricky to work with. There were a lot of nulls and gaps which I had to exclude from the dataset, and the file was pretty untidy. There were also close to a million rows in the file and that meant my pc struggled at times. All of this made manipulating the data tricker than I would have liked.

3. Viz Design

As with last year’s entry I thought I’d use Story Points again. This format has limitations but I think it works well for visualisations that answer multiple questions. In terms of formatting, I’ll be honest. I just didn’t have the time to mess about so I pretty much went with the same style that I used for my Evolution of the Speed Record viz last year.

Construction stats

I also thought I’d use a lot of images with this viz. The seed vault is an impressive construction and had a load of really good quality images available for use. I found it was useful to use a text box to provide additional commentary on each slide.

Seed vault funding

Most of the information about the seed vault made a big deal about how this was a big global project. This led me to question who was contributing and supporting the project and who was pretending to? I was pretty sure there would be a big difference in contributions, both in terms of stock and also finance.

Embedded Wikipedia page

A technique I learned last year was embedding a contextual Wikipedia page into the viz. This provides more detail for anyone wanting to know more about the data points. A good tip is to append “?printable=yes” to the URL to display a more cut down page, as well as using the mobile URL (thanks to David Pires for that tip). Some of the links didn’t work as there wasn’t a direct Wiki page – no big deal.

So there you go. An interesting story for sure and one that was pretty enjoyable to put together.

4. Challenges

This was my first viz in a while. I’ve spent the last year knee-deep in Tableau Server and have a crazy busy job building a Tableau Centre of Excellence, supporting thousands of demanding users.

So my biggest challenge wasn’t data, or thinking of a subject, it was my own lack of ability with Tableau Desktop. I was shocked at how rusty I’d become and even some basic tasks took way longer than they should have. On the plus side it was great to be back on the vizzing horse again! I’m now inspired to get stuck into some of the online training and boost my skills.

Another challenge was actually deciding to have a go. The standards in the Tableau Community have gone through the roof in the last year, and the level of quality out there is absolutely amazing. So for the first time ever I was nervous about even getting my entry out there.

5. Analysis & Story

So what can we take from this story? Here are some of the key observations that Tableau has allowed me to glean from the dataset.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was a decent build. Didn’t cost too much and also only took 20 months. Pretty impressive going.

Interesting to see a huge funding contribution from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, larger than most of the governmental donations.

Some unusual crops stored in the seed vault. Rice at the top, and mostly concentrated around the Triticeae tribe of crop – wheat, maize etc. Surprisingly few fruit. I like blueberries so I’d be stuffed without them for my doomsday breakfast.

Probably not a surprise to see India top the seed donations chart but it was curious to see several African nations amongst the top donators.

I was surprised to see seed donation amounts tailing off big time in recent years. I wonder if that’s down to project apathy or maybe we’ve just got all the samples we need for now?

Wanna know even more? Go check out this Interactive 360 tool.

So that’s it. I hope you enjoy the visualisation. If you do then please consider voting for me in the IronViz competition.

Regards, Paul

How To Set Up Your Tableau Server Environments

Posted on April 4, 2016 by paulbanoub

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.

Environments for your users

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:

Production – The main business & user facing environment. Content published here is authoritative, follows best practice (hopefully) and is actively supported.

Testing – aka UAT. Generally used for final testing of uploaded content

Development – The environment where content is first shared as part of the development process.

Scratch – An extra environment for content that doesn’t need environment management. E.g. User wants to temporarily share content with a couple of colleagues.

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.

Environments for your team

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.

Production – Main environment that serves your users. In our environment this also includes the UAT, Development & Scratch sites for users – but we class it all as production. That might seem odd, but remember that many teams will be development teams, and to them the development site / area is their equivalent of production. So if the development site is down then they can’t work.

Disaster Recovery (DR) – For use in the event of a Production outage that can’t be easily restored. Exact same spec as Production. Totally identical, so that config can be restored and this server can be used as Production. You’ll need to make sure this environment gets the same upgrades as your Production environment.

UAT – This is UAT for my team. If we want to make a change to Production, it gets final testing here. This environment is also the exact same spec as Production to ensure an accurate test. If it fails here then it’s likely to fail in Production as well. We use UAT for testing maintenance releases, config changes and other potentially disruptive non-Tableau related changes to the server. Additionally, we make this environment available to users for a couple of weeks UAT prior to releasing new versions to production.

Engineering – Lower spec than prod & UAT. For testing the latest available release from Tableau. That is likely to be a higher version than production. Is useful for spotting bugs in new versions or confirming that bug-fixes work.

Beta Test – We are proud to be part of Tableau’s pre-release testing audience. We use this server to test releases in the Beta programme. Lower spec than engineering. To the point that the server only just meets the minimum requirements.

Alpha Test – We use this to test the alpha releases or any extra work we may be doing with developers at Tableau. We love to be involved in the genesis of new functionality.

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

How to Build a Tableau Support Team

Posted on February 8, 2016 by paulbanoub

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.

Some assumptions

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).

Where you gonna put them?

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…

Support Levels

Typically large organisations will have a standard Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) model of support roles and responsibilities. To summarise.

Level 1 Support – Detects and registers incidents. Can apply basic remediation but more likely to escalate to Level 2. Level 1 also performs incident triage and communication to affected user base.

Level 2 Support – More skilled technicians with access to your production environment. Can often solve incidents and manage appropriate user communication. L2 also assist us with Tableau Server upgrades and failover tests etc.

Level 3 Support – That’s my immediate team. We have break-glass (non-standing) production access to assist if L2 can’t solve the problem.

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.

What’s Your Service Model?

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?

Context – Users know their data best. They know how it hangs together.

Volume – My team wouldn’t be able to handle the sheer volume of requests coming in and that would lead to a slow service.

Agility – So many tools at big organisations are mired in red tape, delays and bureaucracy. Not my Tableau service. We’ve cut through all of that crap to give users a tool that they can use as they wish, get results and get into production fast. What’s the point of giving someone an agile tool and then making life hard for them to get results?

UX – I love it when a user thinks they are not technical enough to use Tableau. I tell them to go and try it and come back in a day if they are still stuck. I find they come back in a couple of weeks instead, having had a blast. If we just did the work for them, then they wouldn’t get that magical UX that we all love, and they’d think Tableau was just another tool. So I want them to do it themselves, and get that brilliant realisation that they’re using a fantastic application.

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.

Your Team’s Roles

So what type of Tableau work will your team need to cover? We kinda bucket our tasks into the following groups

Engineering – Building, customising and integrating our beautiful Tableau Server with other systems. Upgrades, tuning & generally being nice to it.

Training – Delivering our World Famous training syllabus, Dr Sessions and all the other goodies detailed in this post.

Consultancy – Helping users with visual analytics, issues, performance, or anything else they want.

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.

Adding The Gloss

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.

Makeovers – We pick a viz, download it, make it loads better, send it back to the user with some notes on what we did and what they can do to better understand why we did it. Always a winner. Who doesn’t like their work being made better for free? Needs sensitive communication though as we don’t want these to be seen as a criticism of someone’s work.

Competitions – We’ve got a weekly challenge competition going on and we periodically do other larger viz-offs. We get Tableau involved in the firmwide Hackathon events and offer swag or dedicated time from the team as prizes. We also encourage users to get involved with things like IronViz.

Interviews – Our series “Agile BI talks to…” is proving popular. Basically an internal version of the “2 minutes with…” interviews that we do on this blog. Users love a chance to sell themselves so we have a queue of people wanting to take part.

Champions – This is an internal version of the Tableau Zen Master programme. It is great for building engagement, encouraging competition and driving up standards across your user base. We currently have 2 Champions but I know there are several users who are desperate to be recognised as a Champion. This is a 2-way initiative, Champions sell and evangelise our service and in return we give them extra insight into the product, vendor etc.

Proactivity – Using our Custom Admin Views (wait for post on those please) – we can tell when users are having a bad experience with Tableau – usually down to slow performing visualisations. So rather than have them complain, or suffer in silence, we can reach out and say “We think you might have a problem, let’s fix it”. This usually blows them away. I’ve had comments back like “This is the first time I’ve EVER had an IT team come to me and tell me I may not be getting the most out of their tool – I usually have to complain first – it’s incredible!”.

Tableau Touchpoints – Again, using our Custom Admin Views – we can tell who is engaged with our service. And we can tell what rank they are, and where they work. So I spend a lot of time reaching out to these people (the more senior the better), and making sure they are fully aware of the services we offer. I’ve packaged it into a standard experience called Tableau Touchpoints. Told you I was into branding…

Polls – Simple. Think of a question, put it to a fun vote. We have one on the run at the moment called “What is your favourite chart type?”. Gets people talking and interacting. Sometimes it gets heated. But it always gets people clicking on your community page.

You’re Certifiable Quint!

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.

Monitor Your User Base

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.

Freedom of Expression

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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.

Freshen it Up

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.

The Human League

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.

Change & Incident Management

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.

A Big Thank-You!

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???

How To Train Your Tableau Users

Posted on January 6, 2016 by paulbanoub

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

General Considerations

Before I get into the specific offerings there are a few things you need to consider.

Branding is Critical!

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.

Consider the Timezones

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.

Don’t Worry About Attendance

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.

Manage the Schedule, Don’t Let it Manage You!

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.

Track your Results

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…

Don’t Get Lazy!

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.

Specific Training Offerings

Tableau Self-Learning Pipeline

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.

What is Tableau?
How do I get Tableau?
How much does Tableau cost?
How can I get started with Tableau?

Our 101 page is top of the Community site in a super easy-to-find location. We refer our users to

Internal process to purchase / get the tool
How to connect to our Tableau Server
Tableau online videos
Tableau quick start guides
Tableau Newbie Forum Area
Tableau Starter Kits
A selection of the best blog resources such as Jeffrey Shaffer & Ramon Martinez excellent sites.

This is generally more than enough for your average self-learner to get stuck into.

Create a Training Hierarchy

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.

Tableau Desktop Training Syllabus

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.

Module 1 – Introduction to Tableau
Module 2 – Data Visualisation
Module 3 – Table Calculations
Module 4 – Blending & Joining
Module 5 – Creating Effective Dashboards
Module 6 – Performance & Troubleshooting
Module 7 – Using Tableau at THIS ORGANISATION

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.

Tableau Dr. Sessions

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?

Tableau In Focus

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

Five Ways to Improve Dashboard Performance
Data Blending & Joining
Table Calculations
Deep Dive into LOD Expressions
Advanced Mapping

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.

Tableau Executive Track

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.

Overview of the Tableau Service
Introduction to the Tableau Server
Showcase of current use across the business
Demo of custom admin views & introspection
How to build basic views in Desktop

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.

Content Specific Training

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

Ensure they have followed best practice
Include clear instructions for dashboard use or a link to a page that has such information
Ensure that their audience is briefed and aware of the dashboard usage

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.

Wrap Up

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

How to PROPERLY Back Up Your Tableau Server

Posted on November 15, 2015 by paulbanoub

Hello there,

Whadda ya mean you didn’t take a backup?

Time for another post about Tableau Server and how to get the best out of it in a large-scale, enterprise deployment situation.

Today we are focusing on how to PROPERLY back up your Tableau Server installation.

Like many aspects of enterprise services, this is a simple concept, but one that if you get wrong, can spell disaster. It always amazes me how many people / organisations don’t do this properly or even at all.

You know how annoyed you get when your mum tells you she isn’t backing up all her family photos – well that’s what I get like when I see IT systems neglecting backups.

Note this post refers to a standalone Tableau installation with a manual failover to DR. We don’t yet have a clustered environment. I’ll update the post with considerations when we implement that.

What’s a backup?

Seems a simple question, and there are a number of different types of backups that you can take, each useful in different situations. Here’s what I’ve got in place:

Full System Backup

This is a complete dump of the server filesystems to disk (or tape – there’s still plenty of tape backup infra out there). Most likely it will be one of the big vendor products that look like the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Your full system backup should be set up by your server team when you get your machine. However, the principle of “trust no-one” applies here as always and it’s up to you to check the following:

Have the backups been set up at all?
Are they backing up all the filesystems? – Many times I’ve seen that only operating system partition backups have been set up, and I’ve had to request the application partitions be included.
Have the backups been succeeding? – Get your backup team to send you a report every month of backup completion. They don’t always succeed and you probably won’t be told that there has been a failure.
If you need to perform a restore, do you know the process and how long does it take?

If you get the okay on that then you’re good. But only as an insurance policy. Full system backups can take a long time to restore, and may only be weekly so you could end up losing data even if these are in place. It’s up to you to ensure you’re covered rather than rely on other teams doing things correctly.

Nightly Tableau Backup

There’s no excuse for not having this in place. It’s easy to set up and it is a case of when rather than if it saves your ass.

The tabadmin backup command gets Tableau Server to dump all content & configuration to a single .tsbak file. You don’t have to stop the server to do this and it doesn’t seem to impact performance too much while it is running so this should be the first backup you configure.

A simple script like this will do the job.

@echo OFF
set Binpath="D:\Program Files\Tableau\Tableau Server\9.0\bin"
set Backuppath="D:\Program Files\Tableau\Backups\nightly"
echo %date% %time%: *** Housekeeping started ***

tabadmin backup %Backuppath%\ts_backup_ -d
timeout 5

tabadmin cleanup

move "D:\Program Files\Tableau\Backups\nightly\*" \\\tableau_shr\backups\nightly\
echo %date% %time%: *** Housekeeping completed ***

The tabadmin backup command does the actual work here, dumping everything to a file. Always a good idea to run tabadmin cleanup afterwards to remove logs etc.

We run this script at a quiet time for the server (not that there is one in my global environment). We use the Windows Scheduler on the server but I’d recommend using a decent scheduler like Autosys or whatever your enterprise standard is as WTS is pretty poor.

IMPORTANT: You may have noticed the move command at the end there. That takes our newly created backup file and moves it OFF THE SERVER to a share drive accessible by my backup server. Why? Well what happens if you lose the server and your backup file is on it? You may as well have no backup. So move it somewhere else.

Update – this tip actually saved my ass this week when we lost our entire VM cluster (er.. hardware team – *cough* – what’s going on??) . We were able to failover to the backup server successfully. Going forward we will be soon implementing Tableau’s High Availability capability.

Do make sure you rotate your backup files with a script that deletes the old files or your share drive will fill up. I keep 4 days worth, just in case the current file is somehow corrupted – rare but can happen.

Weekly Restart

You may know I’m not a fan of running enterprise apps on Windows. I prefer Linux for a number of reasons that I’m not going to go into here. I know many users want Tableau Server on Linux, and the amazing Tamas Foldi has only gone and written it himself – so one day we may see it.

Anyway, with Windows apps I always build in a weekly application restart. In our case every Saturday morning. That involves a server reboot (to clean out any OS related temp stuff), application restart and a tabadmin cleanup. The tabadmin cleanup with the server stopped has the added bonus of clearing out the temp files (doesn’t happen when the server is running). These files can get pretty big so worth clearing out.

Virtual Machine Snapshots

If you’re running on a VM then you may be able to utilise the VM snapshot facility. Contact your VM admins for details. I’ve not needed to implement this but I know some that do. VM snapshots are super handy.

Do be aware that Tableau don’t seem to support this though..

Config File Backup

Sometimes it’s handy to just back up your Tableau Server config. I’ve got a script that grabs all the .yml and template files in my Server directory, zips them up and moves them off the server. Pretty useful to refer back to old config settings if you need to. Make sure you include workgroup.yml.

If you’re being really good then you’ll be checking your config files into a revision control repo like SVN.

Site Specific Backups

Tableau Server allows you to backup per site. This doesn’t give me much extra but I know in orgs that have lots of sites, or a site per team / business unit it can be very handy.

One thing that isn’t great about exporting a site is that the site is locked and inaccessible as the export is taking place. See Toby Erkson’s blog for more info on exporting a site.

Backup File Size & Duration

As your environment grows you’ll need to be mindful of the size of your backup file. Mine is around 16GB and takes well over an hour to write. Takes about 25 mins to restore. You’ll need to understand those numbers as your system matures.

Backup files can get pretty big

Another variable that can affect backup time is the specification of your primary server. If your primary is low spec then you’re gonna get a longer time to write a backup. I don’t have any stats on that but I know it is true. Contact Jeff Mills of Tableau if you want more info on Weak Primaries & backup times.

Backup Your Logs

Less important this, but handy to do on a weekly basis is to zip up your logs. We have a much better solution for logfile management using Splunk – you’ll see a blog about that in the future.

The Most Important Bit – TEST YOUR BACKUPS

OK so you’re backing up like a man / woman possessed? Fine. You’re only as good as your last restore. So TEST your backups periodically. Files get corrupted and you don’t want to be discovering that your only backup is broken when you need it.

OK that’s it. Backups can save your life – don’t ignore them. Paranoia is king in IT!

Cheers, Paul