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Allowlists, firewalls & WAFs

TL;DR

The three gatekeepers that can sit between Atlan and Tableau - Tableau Cloud's IP allowlist, your firewall, and WAF content rules - and how to open each.

Connect

Three different gatekeepers can sit between Atlan and Tableau. This page covers all three - because "the IP is allowlisted" does not mean "the traffic gets through".

Do I need this?

SituationGatekeeperWhat to do
Tableau Cloud, admin enabled IP restrictionsTableau Cloud's built-in IP allowlistTableau Cloud
Tableau Server behind a corporate firewallYour firewallFirewall
Tableau Server behind a WAF / reverse proxy / inspection deviceContent rules, not just IPsWAF
None of the above-Nothing. Atlan connects without allowlisting.

Step 0 for all three: Get your Atlan IPs

Every path starts with your tenant's outbound NAT IPs. They are static, tenant-specific, and not published - one support ticket gets them (see Atlan Network Details).

Tableau Cloud IP restrictions

  1. Tableau admin - In Tableau Cloud: Settings → Authentication → IP allowlist (naming varies slightly by release).
  2. Add each Atlan NAT IP as an allowed range (a single IP is the range x.x.x.xx.x.x.x).
  3. Atlan User - Re-run Test Authentication.
Symptom if you skip this

The PAT is valid, yet sign-in is rejected or times out. If a PAT that works from your laptop fails from Atlan, an IP restriction is the first suspect.

Your firewall (Tableau Server)

Ask your network team for one inbound rule:

FieldValue
SourceYour Atlan tenant's NAT IPs (from support - the values below are illustrative)
DestinationThe Tableau Server host
Port443 (or your custom Tableau port)
ProtocolTCP (HTTPS)
DirectionInbound only - Atlan never needs Tableau to connect out
# ALLOW inbound HTTPS from Atlan tenant NAT IPs (examples - get real values from support)
allow tcp from 203.0.113.10, 203.0.113.11 to tableau.example-corp.com port 443

WAFs and inspection proxies

A WAF inspects what a request contains, not just where it comes from. Atlan's lineage crawl sends large GraphQL POST requests to /api/metadata/graphql - which generic WAF rules can misclassify and block even though the source IP is allowlisted. A WAF rule can start rejecting only the connector's metadata queries after either side updates (new WAF rules, or a connector update changing the request signature); crawls then fail with an HTML block page while everything else works.

Give your WAF team this exception request:

  • Allow POST to /api/metadata/graphql and /relationship-service-war/graphql from Atlan's NAT IPs
  • Allow POST/GET to /api/* (Tableau REST API) from the same IPs
  • Exempt these paths from request-body content rules for those source IPs
How to recognize a WAF block

The workflow log shows an HTML error page (e.g. "The requested URL was rejected… support ID …") instead of a JSON error from Tableau. Tableau never returns HTML block pages - that response came from something in front of it.

Verify, whatever you changed

  1. Test Authentication in Atlan - proves sign-in (REST API) works.
  2. Run preflight - its Metadata API check proves the second door works too. A pass on step 1 with a fail on step 2 usually means a content rule, not an IP rule.