Data Governance – Frequently Asked Questions

The revision history function can be enabled by an admin and allows your users to see how workbooks and data sources or content resources have changed over time. Every time someone saves or publishes a content resource, Tableau Server creates a new version, which becomes the current version. The previous version will then become the most recent revision in the revision history list.

Revision history gives users confidence to experiment with their content, knowing that their older versions are available, but note that a limited number of revisions can be saved.

While you’re setting up scheduling, you can also enable automatic emails to notify the owners of data sources or workbooks when refreshes do not complete successfully. By enabling refresh failure notifications, content owners can opt out individually by changing their account settings if they don’t wish to receive these emails.

You can use the resource monitoring tool to keep tabs on the health and performance of your Tableau Server. It can help identify what’s causing slow load times, extract failures, and other critical issues that may impact the user experience.

You can configure incident definitions for a variety of events, such as:

• CPU usage, memory usage, memory availability, disk space, and disk queue length
• Slow queries
• Slow views

These can be configured globally or customized for each environment.

Tableau Prep is smart. It helps standardize data values, using algorithms to do some of the heavy lifting. Say, for example, you have a column of data where customers enter the name of their city. After quickly scrolling through the column, you notice there are several misspellings for the city of Albuquerque. Rather than update each one manually, Tableau Prep has built-in functionality to group and replace common mistakes. Let the algorithm simplify the cleaning process so you don’t have to.

You can set a warning message on a data asset so that users of that data are aware of any issues. For example, you might want to let users know that a data source has been deprecated, or that a refresh has failed for an extract data source, or that a table contains sensitive data.

Giving users a single source of truth is vital to make sure they’re basing decisions on accurate data, and publishing data sources in Tableau is integral to maintaining a single source of truth.

In a self-service environment, using certification can help users to find data that complies with your organisation’s data standards. Data Management Add-on contains a feature called Tableau Catalog, which is designed to help build trust and clarity around your data.

Using Tableau Catalog, you can certify databases and tables that are associated with a workbook, in addition to published data sources, so your users know they’re looking at the most accurate data.

Using collections, you can gather related items into lists that are easy to access and organise. Collections can be private, or shared. When you grant access to a collection, there’s no risk of exposing your data because collections don’t impact the permissions of each item they contain. 

Users will still only be able to view items that they have permission to access, so you don’t need to worry about who owns an item, or which project it’s linked to in Tableau.

Data professionals can curate data sources from your published data that have all the formatting, calculations, descriptions, and colour palettes built in to enable business users to get insights from data easily and with confidence.

 Users can search Tableau Catalog for these curated data sources and understand use cases for all the data you have in there.

Sharing data with multiple stakeholders doesn’t mean you have to build visualizations for every person. Tableau allows you to control who sees data by setting permissions per license, role, site, project, workgroup, group, and user, to name but a few. You can also use data security and user/group filters.

If you want to avoid having to rebuild the same data model multiple times, you can use Row-Level Security to specify which rows any user can view. To scale this approach, use reference tables to create a dynamic filter based on a security field in the data.

Governance in Tableau is a critical step to drive usage and adoption of analytics while maintaining security and integrity of the data, but every organisation is different and will have varying requirements.

Establishing three primary governance models – centralised, delegated, and self-governing – provides the flexibility to satisfy the governance needs of most organisations.

The Data and Content Governance tab in the Tableau Blueprint Planner will help you to define your organisation’s governance models. You should establish and document who is responsible, and which processes support each area within each model.

This is a common requirement. Using a permissions structure, you can allow people to edit and save ad hoc versions of dashboards that are visible to administrators but won’t affect the certified version available for other users.

Where changes need to be approved and tested, the Tableau Content Migration tool can help to define deployment plans for managing content across the content lifecycle: content in development can be tested, validated, and approved, with non-developers adding an action for promotion to production.