6 Replies Latest reply on Nov 6, 2015 9:13 AM by Matt Coles

    Custom Tableau Notifications

    Thomas Cook
    Thomas Cook Nov 6, 2015 5:43 AM

      Over the last couple months I have been putting some effort into notifications.

       

      I ended up with a few goals:

      1. Needed to be able to subscribe groups in addition to individuals
      2. notifications should be push not subscribe
      3. should email an image of the dashboard like in the built in subscriptions
      4. notifications should be sent when:
        1. a workbook is has a publish event
        2. a server datasource extract succeeded
        3. a workbook extract succeeded

       

      I had already been using Pentaho Data Integration to notify users when an extract failed, so I was able to use that as a place to start. I am currently using two csv files for who is subscribe, and what can be subscribed to. It also only generates one image for each dashboard to minimize load on the server. Custom views based on the user would be nice, but not sure if tabcmd can masquerade for user and row level filters.

       

      These aren't the rows you are looking for: Tableau Push instead of Subscribe notifications

       

      Future goals are to

      1. use a couple tables and build a web front end to make it easier to manage for a larger audience.
      2. allow users to sign up and check permissions
        • 1. Re: Custom Tableau Notifications
          Matt Coles
          Matt Coles Employee Nov 6, 2015 7:28 AM (in response to Thomas Cook)

          VizAlerts can do this. It is an all-purpose data-driven alerting tool for Tableau Server that is free and open source.

          • 2. Re: Custom Tableau Notifications
            Thomas Cook
            Thomas Cook Nov 6, 2015 8:24 AM (in response to Matt Coles)

            Yeah, I checked out the session at TC15, but I had been working on this before VizAlerts came out. It looks like they do mostly the same thing, just in different ways.

             

            I never thought about threshold altering in my notifications implementation. Really cool!. I really like how VizAlerts leans on the existing subscriptions and Tableau for the management.

             

            I ended up keeping most of processing outside in PDI and using it to run tabcmd. This will probably have some pros and cons down the road. I need to find some time to try out vizalerts and get to know it.

            • 3. Re: Custom Tableau Notifications
              Matt Coles
              Matt Coles Employee Nov 6, 2015 8:32 AM (in response to Thomas Cook)

              The closest example I have to what it sounds like you're after is this: Example: Subscriptions conditional on a successful Extract Refresh

               

              Each dashboard you want to email to people on all of the events listed in (4) above would need to be customized in the way I describe in my second reply on that post, so I wouldn't necessarily consider it a scalable solution for a server-wide feature at this point if you're trying to do it for every workbook (hopefully before EOY we'll have that, though!)--but it would work fine for a handful of vizzes.

              1 of 1 people found this helpful
              • 4. Re: Custom Tableau Notifications
                Thomas Cook
                Thomas Cook Nov 6, 2015 8:58 AM (in response to Matt Coles)

                I looked at that example this morning. The addition would be for publish events. We have some...less than automated dashboards where the extracts are run in desktop and then published after some QA and tweaking.

                 

                For that it seems like a lot of work. Right now I just add a line to a csv for each subscription.

                 

                I wonder why a time based system was how subscriptions were introduced? For live datasources that is fine (assuming the datasource is updated). Event based seems necessary for extracts. We have to tell people subscribe to a 11am schedule because we think it will be done by then. Then when an extract gets held up in the backgrounder queue, or fails they get the subscription anyway with old data.

                 

                Being able to allow the publisher to set default subscription schedules would also be cool. I will check to see if that is on the list.

                • 5. Re: Custom Tableau Notifications
                  Thomas Cook
                  Thomas Cook Nov 6, 2015 9:08 AM (in response to Thomas Cook)

                  looks like there were lots of conditional and extract based schedule ideas, but none for allowing the publisher to set or limit the notification schedule so I created one. Vote it up!

                   

                  http://community.tableau.com/ideas/5565

                  • 6. Re: Custom Tableau Notifications
                    Matt Coles
                    Matt Coles Employee Nov 6, 2015 9:13 AM (in response to Thomas Cook)

                    I agree, it'd be more work with the current VizAlerts functionality than with your own solution. I wish I had something better to offer!

                     

                    I like your feature Idea, upvoted!