How to Get Tableau Usage Data

Understanding how people actually use your Tableau dashboards is just as important as building them in the first place. Without insight into view counts, user activity, and content popularity, you're essentially guessing about what's valuable. This article will show you exactly how to get your hands on Tableau usage data using the built-in tools for both Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

Why Bother Tracking Tableau Usage?

Before jumping into the "how," it's worth a quick look at the "why." Tracking usage data isn't just about satisfying curiosity, it’s about making your entire business intelligence environment more effective, efficient, and valuable. Here’s what you can achieve:

• Optimize Server Performance: Identify dashboards that are slow to load or extracts that take forever to run. By spotting these performance hogs, you can optimize them and improve the experience for everyone.
• Declutter Your Environment: A Tableau server filled with stale, unused dashboards is confusing for users and a waste of resources. Usage data helps you find and archive content nobody is looking at anymore.
• Improve Content Strategy: See which dashboards are business-critical and which ones are being ignored. Double down on what works and get feedback on why certain views aren't getting traction.
• Justify Licensing Costs: Knowing who is actively using Tableau helps you manage licenses. Are there inactive users occupying expensive seats? Usage data provides the proof you need to reallocate licenses effectively.
• Boost User Adoption: When you roll out a new set of dashboards, you need to know if people are actually using them. Tracking views over time tells you whether your training and launch efforts are successful.

Method 1: Connect to the Tableau Server Repository (For Tableau Server)

For those running a self-hosted Tableau Server, the most powerful way to get detailed usage data is by tapping directly into its underpinnings: the Tableau Server Repository. This is a PostgreSQL database that acts as the brain of your server, logging nearly every action that takes place.

It sounds technical, but connecting to it is surprisingly straightforward, especially if you use Tableau Desktop to analyze it - it’s a great example of using Tableau to analyze Tableau!

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

Step 1: Enable External Access to the PostgreSQL Database

By default, external access to this database is turned off for security. A server administrator needs to enable it. This is typically done via the command line on the machine where Tableau Server is installed.

You’ll need to open a Command Prompt as an administrator and run the following TSM (Tableau Services Manager) command:

tsm data-access repository-access enable --repository-username readonly --repository-password <your-strong-password>

A few things to note:

• It's a best practice to create a readonly user. This ensures you can’t accidentally change or delete critical server data.
• Choose a secure, complex password.
• After running this command, you'll need to apply the changes by running tsm pending-changes apply. This might require a quick server restart.

Step 2: Connect with Tableau Desktop

Once access is enabled, you can connect to the repository just like any other database source from Tableau Desktop.

1. Open Tableau Desktop and in the "Connect" pane, select "PostgreSQL".
2. Enter the connection details:
3. Click "Sign In". You are now connected to a wealth of data about your server!

Step 3: Explore the Key Data Tables

Inside the repository, you'll find hundreds of tables. Don't worry, you only need to focus on a few key ones to answer 90% of your usage questions. The tables with a _ prefix or that are part of the public schema are generally the safest and most useful to use.

Here are the greatest hits:

• historical_events: This is the most important table. It’s a detailed log of every significant action, like 'View Workbook', 'Login', 'Publish View', etc.
• historical_event_types: A simple lookup table to tell you what the event type names and IDs in historical_events actually mean.
• hist_users: A list of users involved in the events.
• hist_views: A list of the views that were interacted with.
• hist_workbooks: A list of the workbooks that were interacted with.

By joining these tables, you can create powerful reports. For example, to find the most viewed dashboards, you would join historical_events with hist_views and filter for the "View View" event type.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

Method 2: Use the Built-in Administrative Views

If you don’t want to connect directly to the repository or you need a quick, high-level overview, Tableau Server comes with a fantastic set of pre-built dashboards for this exact purpose. They give you a quick digest of server health and user activity without any setup.

You can find them by navigating to the "Site Status" page on your Tableau Server.

What You'll Find Here:

• Traffic to Views: This is one of the most useful reports. It quickly shows you the most popular views (worksheets, dashboards), who has been viewing them, and when. It's a goldmine for spotting popular content.
• Traffic to Data Sources: Similar to the above, but focuses specifically on the usage of published data sources. This helps you understand which core datasets are proving most valuable to your users.
• Actions by All Users / Specific User: A quick-glance audit trail of what’s happening in your Server environment. You can see who logged in, what they viewed, and if they published anything.
• Background Tasks for Extracts: A performance-focused view that lets administrators monitor the success rates and run times of extract refreshes. If dashboards aren't updating properly, this is the first place to look.

These views are perfect for day-to-day monitoring, though they don't offer the deep customization you get from connecting directly to the repository.

Method 3: Leverage Admin Insights (For Tableau Cloud)

What if you're using Tableau Cloud (formerly Online)? You can't connect to a PostgreSQL repository in the same way. Instead, Tableau provides a dedicated project called Admin Insights specifically for this.

The Admin Insights project gives site administrators access to curated data sources and a pre-built dashboard that surfaces key usage statistics. It's designed to give you the information you need right out of the box.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

How to Use Admin Insights:

1. As a Site Administrator, log in to your Tableau Cloud site.
2. Navigate to the "Explore" section and look for a project named "Admin Insights".
3. Inside, you’ll find the ready-to-use "Admin Insights" dashboard. This workbook answers many common questions about user engagement, popular content, and site activity.
4. You'll also find the underlying published data sources themselves (e.g., TS_Events, TS_Users). The real power comes from connecting a new Tableau workbook to these data sources. This allows you to build completely custom usage dashboards tailored to your specific needs, giving you a similar level of flexibility as the Server Repository method.

Admin Insights is the standard and best way for Tableau Cloud users to report on user adoption, content usage, and overall site health.

Final Thoughts

Tracking how your audience interacts with your visualizations isn't just a "nice-to-have" administrative task - it’s how you turn a good BI platform into a great one. Whether you're connecting to the Tableau Server Repository for deep analysis or using the quick-glance Admin Views, the tools are there to help you clean up content, help users, and prove the value of your work.

While Tableau provides powerful capabilities, manually connecting sources, analyzing repository tables, and building these reports from scratch still takes time away from acting on the insights themselves. At Graphed, we've focused on simplifying this entire process. We allow you to connect your most important data sources, and then simply ask questions in plain English to build real-time reports and dashboards. You can immediately get answers about your marketing or sales performance without ever needing to worry about database schemas, letting you focus on making smarter decisions, faster. If that sounds like a better way to work, try creating a dashboard with Graphed for free.