Crawl Tableau

Extract metadata from your Tableau environment and make it available in Atlan for data discovery, governance, and lineage tracking.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have:

• Set up Tableau with proper user permissions
• Network connectivity between Atlan and your Tableau instance (or set up a private network link if needed)
• Reviewed the order of operations

Create crawler workflow

1. In the top right of any screen, navigate to New > New Workflow.
2. From the list of packages, select Tableau Assets and click Setup Workflow.

Configure extraction

Atlan offers three extraction methods to connect to your Tableau environment. Select the method that best fits your security and infrastructure requirements:

Direct

Atlan connects directly to your Tableau Online or Tableau Server instance to crawl metadata.

1. For Host Name, enter the host name of your Tableau Online or Tableau Server instance (or the private DNS name if your Tableau Server instance uses an SSL certificate).
2. For Port, enter the port number of your Tableau instance.
3. For Authentication, choose how to connect to Tableau:
   • For Basic authentication, enter the Username and Password you use to log in to Tableau.
   • For Personal Access Token authentication, enter the Personal Access Token Name and Personal Access Token Value you generated_Create_a_personal_access_token).
   • For JWT Bearer authentication, enter your Tableau Server username or Tableau Online email address for Username, and the Client ID, Secret ID, and Secret Value you copied from the connected app in Tableau.
4. For SSL, keep the default Enabled to use HTTPS or click Disabled to use HTTP.
5. For Site, enter the name of the site you want to crawl. (If left blank, Atlan uses the default site.) If you are using Tableau Online, the site is required for Atlan to authenticate properly.
6. For SSL certificate, this is only required if your Tableau Server instance uses a self-signed or an internal CA SSL certificate, paste a supported SSL certificate in the recommended format.
7. At the bottom of the form, click Test Authentication to confirm connectivity to Tableau using these details.
8. When successful, click Next.

Offline

Use Atlan's tableau-extractor tool to extract metadata from Tableau and upload it to S3. This method is useful for on-premises Tableau instances that can't be directly accessed by Atlan. First extract the metadata yourself and then make it available in S3.

1. For Bucket name, enter the name of your S3 bucket.
2. For Bucket prefix, enter the S3 prefix under which all the metadata files exist. These include dashboards/result-0.json and workbooks/result-0.json.
3. For Bucket region, enter the name of the S3 region.
4. When complete, click Next.

Agent

Use Atlan's Secure Agent to extract metadata from within your organization's environment. This method is ideal for environments with strict network security requirements.

1. Select the Agent tab.
2. Configure the Tableau data source by adding the secret keys for your secret store. For details on the required fields, refer to the Direct extraction method.
3. Complete the Secure Agent configuration by following the instructions in the How to configure Secure Agent for workflow execution guide.
4. Click Next after completing the configuration.

Configure connection

To complete the Tableau connection configuration:

1. Provide a Connection Name that represents your source environment. For example, you might want to use values like production, development, gold, or analytics.
2. To change the users able to manage this connection, change the users or groups listed under Connection Admins. If you don't specify any user or group, nobody can manage the connection - not even admins.

Configure crawler

On the Metadata page, you can override the defaults for any of these options. If a project appears in both the include and exclude filters, the exclude filter takes precedence. (The Exclude Projects Regex also takes precedence.)

1. To select the Tableau projects you want to include in crawling, click Include Projects. (Defaults to all assets, if none are specified.)
2. To select the Tableau projects you want to exclude from crawling, click Exclude Projects. (Defaults to no assets, if none are specified.)
3. To have the crawler ignore Tableau projects based on a naming convention, specify a regular expression in the Exclude Projects Regex field.
4. To check for any permissions or other configuration issues before running the crawler, click Preflight checks.

Configure advanced controls

On the Advanced page, you can override the defaults for any of these options:

• For Alternate Host URL, enter the protocol and host name to be used for viewing assets directly in Tableau.
• For Crawl Unpublished Worksheets and Dashboards, click Yes to enable crawling hidden worksheets and dashboards or No to skip crawling them.
• For Hidden Datasource Fields, click Yes to enable crawling hidden datasource fields or No to skip crawling them.
• For Crawl Embedded Dashboards, an embedded dashboard is linked or displayed inside another dashboard by providing a link in a Web Page item. For more information about lineage, see Lineage.
  • Click Yes to enable relationships between embedded dashboards.
  • Click No to skip creating relationships between embedded dashboards.

Run crawler

To run the Tableau crawler:

• You can either:
  • To run the crawler once immediately, at the bottom of the screen, click the Run button.
  • To schedule the crawler to run hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly, at the bottom of the screen, click the Schedule Run button.

Once the crawler completes, the assets appear in Atlan's asset page! 🎉

See also

• What does Atlan crawl from Tableau: Learn what assets and metadata Atlan crawls from Tableau
• Troubleshoot Tableau connectivity: Resolve common issues with Tableau connections