Project Griffon - Pre-built Admin Views: Reloaded

16 Dec 2020

[ tableau  project-griffon  tableau-server  postgres  ]

Project Griffon logo on blue background

With Project Griffon, we want to share examples and started with you – the Tableau Community. The objective here is to share tools which use what you have in front of you to help explain more about what’s going on. Please be sure to read the introduction to Project Griffon

Project Griffon - Tableau Server Built-in Admin Views Reloaded

I’ve moved jobs over the last 6 months, and in this new role I’ve taken on the Tableau Server administrator responsibilities. As part of this, of course I kicked off by uploading a bunch of pre-built admin views from Project Griffon which you can find on the Tableau Community page.

Alongside this, I also spent some time to upload the pre-built admin views, and in this process spent time to do a personal makeover of them, and I thought it might be useful for at least one other Server Admin out there to take away this ‘starter pack’.

** 🚨 IF YOU JUST WANT THE GOOD STUFF THERE IS A TL;DR AT THE BOTTOM 🚨 **

The reason for the makeover was partially down to aethetic, partially down to the being annoyed by limited filters (no apply button for example) and also being annoyed by the ‘range’ of the dashboard. Again, these are wholly my own choice, and your mileage may vary.

The first thing I did was download the admin views - I downloaded this from a blog post I posted on The Information Lab blog when I worked there & then took some time to plan out how these should be structured.

I wanted to minimise the amount of space these workbooks took & also publish common datasources (like the Audit Tables datasource) as a separate datasource. These are as follows, and the relevant workbooks:

Audit Tables

(01) Traffic to Views (02) Traffic to Datasources (03) Actions by All Users (04) Actions by Specific User (05) Actions by Recent Users

Background Tasks

(06) Background Tasks for Extracts (07) Background Tasks for Non-Extracts (10) Background Task Delays

Monitor Requests And Users

(08) Stats for Load Times (11) Performance of Views

Resources and Extracts

(09) Stats for Space Usage

Sessions

(05) Actions by Recent Users

Start Times For Sessions

(08) Stats for Load Times

View Stats

(09) Stats for Space Usage

Historical Disk Usage

(12) Server Disk Space

I have each of these datasources published inside a project on my Tableau Server, and each is a Live connection. However, you may want to set these on an extract, and of course please bear in mind that the Tableau Postgres connection will default to 6 months of data unless you have changed it using TSM.

So before you start, I would recommend uploading the above datasources. I have attached local copies which will only work for 2020.3 onwards, but if you have a previous version you can grab them from the workbooks here. Personally, my next step would be to use the above list to plan out (if you are planning to publish these datasources separately as I have) which order to upload the workbooks. The next part of the blog post will look at before/after makeovers of each viz, as well as a link to download each one.

As ever, please swap out the postgres connection details for your own!

01. Traffic to Views

To find out more about this view, check out this which goes through some example questions you may ask of this chart

01 Old

You are able to download the reloaded version here.

02. Traffic to Datasources

To find out more about this view, check out this which goes through some example questions you may ask of this chart

02 Old

You are able to download the reloaded version here.

03. Actions by All Users

To find out more about this view, check out this which goes through some example questions you may ask of this chart

03 Old

You are able to download the reloaded version here.

04. Actions by Specific Users

To find out more about this view, check out this which goes through some example questions you may ask of this chart

04 Old

You are able to download the reloaded version here.

05. Actions by Recent Users

To find out more about this view, check out this which goes through some example questions you may ask of this chart

05 Old

You are able to download the reloaded version here.

06. Background Tasks for Extracts

To find out more about this view, check out this which goes through some example questions you may ask of this chart

06 Old

You are able to download the reloaded version here.

07. Background Tasks for Non-Extracts

To find out more about this view, check out this which goes through some example questions you may ask of this chart

07 Old

You are able to download the reloaded version here.

08. Stats for Load Times

To find out more about this view, check out this which goes through some example questions you may ask of this chart

08 Old

You are able to download the reloaded version here.

09. Stats for Space Usage

To find out more about this view, check out this which goes through some example questions you may ask of this chart

09 Old

You are able to download the reloaded version here.

10. Background Task Delay

To find out more about this view, check out this which goes through some example questions you may ask of this chart

10 Old

You are able to download the reloaded version here.

11. Performance of Views

To find out more about this view, check out this which goes through some example questions you may ask of this chart

11 Old

You are able to download the reloaded version here.

12. Server Disk Space

To find out more about this view, check out this which goes through some example questions you may ask of this chart

12 Old

You are able to download the reloaded version here.

Right click, save as…

  1. Traffic to Views here
  2. Traffic to Datasources here
  3. Actions by All Users here
  4. Actions by Specific User here
  5. Actions by Recent Users here
  6. Background Tasks for Extracts here
  7. Background Tasks for Non-Extracts here
  8. Stats for Load Times here
  9. Stats for Space Usage here
  10. Background Task Delays here
  11. Performance of Views here
  12. Server Disk Space here

Any questions or comments, you can find me with open DMs on Twitter @Scribblr_42 - Enjoy!