Tableau Online: Create an Exportable List of Users & Other Custom Admin Views

Several months ago, I had a client reach out to me asking if I could provide him with traffic data for his numerous projects on our Tableau Online site.  Being an “accidental admin” of our internal Tableau Server and Tableau Online, I wasn’t sure exactly the best way to make this happen.  I knew about the pre-built admin views, but I really needed a custom report for just a couple of projects and a handful of users.  Through some research, I ultimately landed on something called Admin Insights – and it was exactly what I needed!

What is Admin Insights?

If you’ve never heard of it, don’t worry, you’re not alone.  Admin Insights for Tableau Online was introduced over a year ago in version 2019.2.  It allows administrators to better understand their site usage by allowing them to create their own, customizable admin views to meet the exact needs of the organization. Over time, I’ve learned that this feature has flew way under the radar and found that many other Tableau Online administrators didn’t even know it existed. 

In this blog post, I’ll talk a bit about Admin Insights and point you to some documentation from Tableau on how to get started.  Then later I’ll tell you how I used Admin Insights to create an exportable list of users – something I wanted to do for quite some time, but didn’t know exactly how to do it. 

As a side note, I understand that there are some other tools, products and APIs that can help solve these problems.  However, this functionality is built right into Tableau Online, is easy to set up, easy to use, and very customizable. 

Set Up

If you do a Google search for Tableau Admin Insights, some resources will instruct you to just go to the Admin Insights project on Tableau Online, but when you login, you probably won’t see that folder.  The reason is that Admin Insights must be enabled before it can be used.  The process to enable it is fairly straightforward and the Tableau website does a good job of explaining it.  Check out Enable and Manage Admin Insights.

Edit 07/24/20: After publishing this blog post, Tableau actually turned Admin Insights on for all Tableau Online customers!  This means that you don't have to enable it.  For more information, check out this notification on the Tableau Community Forums.  Thanks Tableau!

A Few Notes

Admin Insights includes two published data sources – TS Events & TS Users.  It also includes a starter viz with six different views.  The data sources include the most recent three months of data. This actually equates to 93 days of data.  The key is that you can connect to these published data sources and create any custom views that you like. 

For more information on how to use Admin Insights, check out Manage Admin Insights and Use Admin Insights on Tableau’s website.

Create an Exportable List of Users

I’ve been an “accidental admin” for about a year and a half.  On numerous occasions over that time, I’ve wanted to export a list of my users into Excel.  I’ve needed it to report active user figures to leadership, for billing purposes, I’ve wanted to create an email distribution list, and for many other reasons.  Through my research, I couldn’t find an easy way to do this.  (As mentioned above, I understand that there are some other tools, products and APIs that can help solve these problems, but I wanted something with a low entry point).  Admin Insights solved this issue and allowed me to build an exportable list of users that is always updated.

To start, open Desktop and click Server at the top.  Click Sign In, choose Tableau Online, then log into Tableau Online.  Under Connect, choose Tableau Server.  From here, you should see all of your published data sources.  If you’ve enabled Admin Insights, you should see TS Users and TS Events, select TS Users and click Connect.  Now you are connected and can begin building your viz. 

For my user list, I kept things very simple.  I created a crosstab of User Email and Site Role (just put them both on Rows).  I then filtered on Site Role to exclude Unlicensed users.  I wanted just a bit more information, so I created a calculation (SPLIT( [User Email], "@", 2 ) to get the domain from the User Email so that I could sort by my users. 

I cleaned up the design a bit and placed that sheet on a dashboard.  From here, I just had to set it up for download.  There are a couple of options on how to do this, but my favorite technique is from Andy Kriebel in what he calls “the greatest Tableau tip ever”.  You pretty much just add .csv to the end of the URL once published, but I suggest that you read Andy’s full easy-to-understandblog post. 

When you are done, you will have a URL that ends with CSV.  If you copy and paste that URL into a web browser, the CSV of that table will be automatically downloaded.  From here, just add an Excel image to the dashboard, add the URL to the image, then publish.  When a user clicks on the image, it will download your user list as a csv.  And that’s it!

Wrap-Up

Admin Insights is an awesome tool.  It incredibly easy to set up and even more powerful.  If you aren’t already using it for your Tableau Online site, I strongly encourage you to enable it and get started today….and build that exportable list of users – I use mine all the time! 

Thanks for reading and as always, let me know if you have any questions.

 

Kevin Flerlage, July 13, 2020

Twitter | LinkedIn | Tableau Public