What is Tableau Activity?

Building a great Tableau dashboard is only half the battle, knowing who uses it, how they use it, and whether it’s even running efficiently is where the real work begins. This is the domain of "Tableau activity," the collection of data that tracks every user interaction and system event on your Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud instance. This article breaks down exactly what Tableau activity is, why it’s critical for success, and how you can tap into it to manage your platform like a pro.

What Data is Included in Tableau Activity?

Tableau meticulously logs nearly everything that happens on your analytics platform. Think of it as a comprehensive audit trail that captures the story of how your data and dashboards are consumed. This information is stored in a behind-the-scenes database called the PostgreSQL repository and can be grouped into a few key categories.

User Interactions

This is the core of your activity data, showing how people are engaging with your content. It answers questions like:

• Sign Ins: Who is logging in and when? Are users consistently active, or is usage sporadic?
• Content Views: Which specific dashboards, views, and workbooks are being accessed most frequently?
• Filter and Parameter Interactions: How are users slicing and dicing the data? Are they using the filters and parameters you designed to explore the information?
• Downloads and Exports: Are people exporting data as images, crosstabs (CSVs), or PDFs? Tracking this can uncover needs for different reporting formats or identify potential data governance issues.
• Subscriptions and Alerts: Who has subscribed to a dashboard for regular email updates? Which data-driven alerts have been triggered and sent?

Content Usage and Stewardship

Beyond individual clicks, activity data provides a high-level view of your entire content library, helping you manage it effectively.

• Popularity: See at a glance which data sources and dashboards are the most popular across the entire organization. This helps identify high-value assets and best practices.
• Stale Content: On the flip side, you can easily find "content graveyards" - workbooks and views that haven't been accessed in months. This is crucial for decluttering and maintaining a trustworthy analytics environment.
• Publishing History: Track who is publishing new content, how often, and to which projects. This gives you insight into content creation trends and departmental adoption.

System Performance and Health

Tableau activity data isn't just about users, it’s also about the health of the system itself.

• View Load Times: One of the most critical metrics. How long do your dashboards take to load for users? You can pinpoint specific views that are performing poorly and investigate the cause.
• Extract Refresh Success/Failure: Are your background data refreshes running on schedule, or are they failing? Activity logs tell you which extracts are causing problems so you can fix them before users complain about stale data.
• System Resource Usage: Monitor CPU and memory usage over time to understand peak usage hours and plan for hardware capacity needs as your user base grows.

Why Monitoring Tableau Activity is a Game-Changer

Tuning into your Tableau activity is the difference between simply having a BI tool and running a successful, high-impact analytics program. By monitoring this data, you unlock several powerful advantages.

Optimize Dashboard Performance

Nothing kills user adoption faster than a slow dashboard. Activity data helps you become a performance detective. You can sort views by their average load time to find the worst offenders. For example, if you see the "Quarterly Sales Review" dashboard takes 45 seconds to load, you can investigate whether a duplicative data source, an overly complex calculation, or too many filters are causing the bottleneck. Fixing these issues creates a much better experience for everyone.

Boost User Adoption and Engagement

You spent weeks building the perfect marketing campaign dashboard, but is anyone actually using it? Instead of guessing, you can look at the activity logs to see its view count. If engagement is low, you know it's time to act. Maybe users need more training, the data isn’t seen as trustworthy, or the dashboard simply isn’t answering the right questions. Without this data, that important content would just sit there, adding no value.

Clean Up and Curate Your Content

Over time, Tableau instances can become cluttered with old, irrelevant, or test workbooks. This digital hoarding makes it harder for users to find the official, validated dashboards they need. By running a "stale content" report (e.g., "show me all workbooks not viewed in the last 180 days"), you can identify what to archive or delete. This practice, known as content stewardship, is essential for maintaining a clean and trustworthy platform.

Enhance Security and Governance

Activity logs provide a vital audit trail for data security. You can see who is accessing sensitive data sources, who is changing permissions on a project, and who is downloading large summaries of data. For example, if you see a user exporting thousands of rows of customer data every day, it might prompt a conversation about data handling policies and whether they need a different reporting solution for their needs.

How to Access and Analyze Your Tableau Activity Data

Tableau provides a couple of primary ways to get your hands on this rich activity data. You can start with the out-of-the-box tools or connect directly to the underlying raw data for complete control.

Method 1: Use Tableau’s Built-In Admin Insights

Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud come with a pre-built project called Admin Insights. This project contains ready-made dashboards designed to give server administrators a high-level overview of key activity metrics. You'll find dashboards for:

• Tracking total views and traffic to specific dashboards.
• Monitoring successful and failed extract refreshes.
• Identifying stale content that isn't being used.

Admin Insights is the perfect starting point. It’s turnkey and requires no setup. However, its dashboards aren't customizable, so if you want to dig deeper or ask very specific questions, you’ll need to connect to the source.

Method 2: Connect Directly to the PostgreSQL Repository

For ultimate flexibility, you can connect Tableau Desktop directly to the PostgreSQL database (or "repository") that powers your Tableau instance. This is where every single log and event is stored. While it sounds a bit technical, it gives you the power to build completely custom monitoring dashboards tailored to your exact needs.

Steps to Connect:

1. Enable external access: First, a server administrator needs to enable access to the PostgreSQL repository for the built-in, read-only user (readonly). This is a security step to ensure you can query the data without accidentally changing anything.
2. Get connection details: You'll need the server address, port (usually 8060), and the password for the readonly user.
3. Connect from Tableau Desktop: Open Tableau Desktop, choose "PostgreSQL" as the data source, and enter the connection details.

Once connected, you'll see a long list of tables with names like _users, _views, _workbooks, and historical_events. By joining these tables, you can create powerful, custom reports.

Three Essential Custom Reports You Can Build:

Starting with a blank canvas can be intimidating. Here are three practical reports you can build using the repository data to get immediate value.

1. Unused Content Dashboard

• Goal: Find dashboards and workbooks that nobody has looked at recently.
• Tables to Use: Join the workbooks table with the views_stats table. You can also directly use the last_viewed_at field on the workbooks and views tables.
• How to Build: Create a view showing workbook names sorted by their last view date. Add a filter for "Last Viewed Date" and set it to a range, such as "more than 180 days ago." This instantly gives you a list of content to investigate for archiving.

2. User Adoption Leaderboard

• Goal: Identify your power users and users who might need more support.
• Tables to Use: Join the historical_events table with the hist_users table.
• How to Build: Filter the historical_events table where the "historical_event_type_id" corresponds to "Login" or "Access View." You can then create a bar chart that shows a distinct count of views or total logins by username. This helps you celebrate your analytics champions and reach out to users with low engagement.

3. View Performance Monitor

• Goal: Find your slowest-loading dashboards so you can optimize them.
• Tables to Use: The primary table here is _views.
• How to Build: Create a simple table or bar chart showing the "View Name" and the "Avg Load Time (in seconds)." Sort it from longest to shortest load time. This immediately surfaces your biggest performance issues, giving you a clear, prioritized list of dashboards to fix.

Final Thoughts

Analyzing Tableau activity transforms your role from just a dashboard creator to a true administrator of an analytics platform. It provides the feedback loop needed to improve content, optimize performance, increase user engagement, and ensure your data governance policies are being followed. It’s the key to making your investment in Tableau truly pay off.

And while analyzing repository data is powerful, it still requires technical steps and ongoing effort to maintain your own administrative views. Our goal in building Graphed is to remove that friction completely for your core sales and marketing data. We connect to your data sources like Salesforce, Google Analytics, Shopify, and HubSpot and let you create real-time reports just by asking questions in plain English. Instead of learning database schemas, you can just ask, "Which of our marketing campaigns are driving the most sales?" and get an instant, live-updating dashboard, letting you focus entirely on the answers, not the setup.