Tableau Server Makes Serving Up Data Visualizations Fast and Easy
August 10, 2018
Tableau Server Makes Serving Up Data Visualizations Fast and Easy
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Server
We have 55 licenses for Tableau Server. The licenses are dispersed across the organization . . . Executive Suite, Finance, Sales, Marketing, Supply Chain, Operations, QC, etc. We collect much more data in our DW than we are currently asked to report or visualize via Tableau. That being said, we have Tableau workbooks with dashboards that allow our data consumers to analyze customer profitability, product, brand & category performance, overall state of the business, fulfillment performance, etc. Our operations group uses Tableau workbooks and dashboards to forecast SKU demand and adjust pick location designations, etc. The product is very ingrained in our organization.
Pros
- Tableau Server allows our Business Analysts to customize existing dashboards or connect to published data sources to do their own what-if analysis with needing our BI group to intervene to get them what they want. Careful thought, you need to get their adhoc results validated.
- Tableau Server allows users to save filter settings and to save various workbooks/dashboards as favorites, either for themselves or publicly for all users to use.
- Tableau Server allows the ability to subscribe to a dashboard and receive updates.
- Tableau Server allows you to access the statistical data regarding what users are accessing, who is accessing it and how often, very useful
- Tableau Server allows you to monitor the status of data source refreshes and to view errors that may have occurred.
- Tableau server has an extravagant set of commands that allow you script many day to day reports, backups, etc.
Cons
- Enhanced ability for end consumers to do ad-hoc analysis using near/pseudo English what if's. This is huge. We create dashboards working with end users. Afterward the business has some changes and the dashboards do not unless we/IT changes them. So the dashboards we develop pretty much follow the 80/20 Pareto rule. Over time, they only temporarily cover the most integral 20%. Unfortunately the other 80% can usually be ball parked.
- The DB write-back capability that just came out in 2018.2 sounds very cool. Hopefully it's well documented and not too complex to implement/use.
- Fix the TSM upgrade script for 2018.2. This is probable not the right forum.
- Tableau Server has allowed us to reduce the total volume of reports and to consolidate multiple sources of reporting down to a single source of the truth, accessed from our data warehouse via Tableau workbooks/dashboards hosted on Tableau Server.
- Tableau Server's internal database allows us to track who is accessing what workbooks, dashboards and views, and how often. This helps to identify workbooks and or dashboards that may have become obsolete.
- The simplicity of setting up and administering the Tableau Server allows that to be absorbed by our small BI team of 2 along with the Tableau and backend data warehouse development.
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