Hi Mohammad,

1. Running VizAlerts on Mac. I tried it a bit very early on, what I remember is that I had to be careful with setting up the file paths.

2. You can run VizAlerts from a desktop machine (that’s how I did development), you’d use Tableau Desktop to publish. There are two things to keep in mind:

a. VizAlerts requires using the readonly user on Tableau’s internal PostgreSQL database, so you’ll need to work with your Tableau Server admins to get that readonly access set up. In VizAlerts 2.0 (coming soon!) someone will need to use the readonly user to publish a Tableau viz

b. VizAlerts is going to impose extra load on Tableau Server, you’ll need to anticipate that.

3. I have no idea to get comment notifications, that would be a fantastic use of VizAlerts tho! Hopefully someone can jump in on that.

Jonathan

To add to what Jonathan said, your Server admin will also need to tell Tableau Server to "trust" your Mac's IP address using the Trusted Authentication settings we describe in the install guide. That effectively gives you rights to load any viz you want on Tableau Server as if you were an administrator...so I can see that being a sticking point if you really shouldn't have that level of privilege.

Here's a solution for comment notifications:

Example: Notify view owner when someone comments on it

It's not immediate, since Tableau Server only lets you use 15-minute schedules. So there'd be an up-to-15 minute delay between when someone commented on the view, and when the email was sent.

One more thing--for the "Notify on Comment" link I provided, make sure you filter out comments that contain only "test_alert". That's a triggering mechanism we use for VizAlerts, so if you don't exclude, that each time people want to test their alerts, it will email them that they added that comment, which would just be spam.