How to crawl Tableau

Once you have configured Tableau, you can establish a connection between Atlan and Tableau. (If you are also using a private network for Tableau, you will need to set that up first, too.)

To crawl metadata from Tableau, review the order of operations and then complete the following steps.

Select the source

To select Tableau as your source:

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

Provide credentials

• In Direct extraction, Atlan connects to Tableau and crawls metadata directly.
• In Offline extraction, you need to first extract metadata yourself and make it available in S3.

Direct extraction method

To enter your Tableau credentials:

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 you would like 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.
   • 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. (Optional) 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, the default site will be used.)
   🚨 Careful! If you are using Tableau Online, the site is required for Atlan to authenticate properly.
6. (Optional) 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 the Test Authentication button to confirm connectivity to Tableau using these details.
8. When successful, at the bottom of the screen click the Next button.

Offline extraction method

Atlan also supports the offline extraction method for fetching metadata from Tableau. This method uses Atlan's tableau-extractor tool to fetch metadata. You will need to first extract the metadata yourself and then make it available in S3.

To enter your S3 details:

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, workbooks/result-0.json, and so on.
3. (Optional) For Bucket region, enter the name of the S3 region.
4. When complete, at the bottom of the screen, click Next.

Configure the 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. (Optional) To change the users able to manage this connection, change the users or groups listed under Connection Admins.
   🚨 Careful! If you do not specify any user or group, nobody will be able to manage the connection — not even admins.

Configure the crawler

Before running the Tableau crawler, you can further configure it.

1. On the Metadata page, you can override the defaults for any of these options:
   • To select the Tableau projects you want to include in crawling, click Include Projects. (This will default to all assets, if none are specified.)
   • To select the Tableau projects you want to exclude from crawling, click Exclude Projects. (This will default to no assets, if none are specified.)
   • To have the crawler ignore Tableau projects based on a naming convention, specify a regular expression in the Exclude Projects Regex field.
2. To check for any permissions or other configuration issues before running the crawler, click Preflight checks.

Configure advanced controls

Before running the Tableau crawler, you can also configure advanced controls for the crawler.

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.

Run the crawler

To run the Tableau crawler, after completing the steps above:

• 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 has completed running, you will see the assets in Atlan's asset page! 🎉