Create Custom Administrative Views
In addition to the pre-built administrative views available on the Maintenance page on the Server, you can use Tableau Desktop to query and build your own analyses of server activity. To do this, you can connect to and query views in the Tableau Server repository using one of two built-in users: the "tableau" or "readonly" user.
- The tableau user—The tableau user has access to special views and a subset of tables in repository database. These views and tables are provided so that administrators can create custom administrative views. Tableau makes an effort to limit changes to these tables and views so that custom views built with them do not break.
- The readonly user—The readonly user has access to a large number of the repository tables, providing more data about server usage. Administrators can use these to create custom administrative views too, but many of the tables are intended primarily to support the functioning of Tableau Server and may be changed or removed without warning. This means that views created from these tables can break when the database structure is changed.Note: The readonly user is available in Tableau Server 8.2.5 and later.For examples of using the readonly user to connect to the workgroup database, see the following articles in the Tableau Knowledge Base: Group Membership, Server Access, Server Access (2),and Workgroup Usage
Before you can connect using one of the built-in users, you must enable access to the Tableau Server database. After doing this you can use Tableau Desktop to connect to and query the database as the tableau user or the readonly user.
The tabadmin set option auditing.enabled controls whether Tableau Server collects historical user activity and other information in the repository. It is enabled by default. Be aware that collecting historical events impacts the size of Tableau Server's backup file (.tsbak).
- All hist_ tables are controlled by the tabadmin set option wgserver.audit_history_expiration_days, which controls how many days of event history are kept in the repository and has default value of 183 days.
- The _http_requests table is cleaned of all data older than 7 days every time tabadmin cleanup or tabadmin backup is used. For more information, see Remove Unneeded Files.
- The _background_tasks table is cleaned automatically and keeps data for the last 30 days.
- All other tables with names that begin with a "_" prefix contain current data.