We all know that the key to a successful analytics practices hinges on a well performing Tableau Server, but it can be challenging to wrap your arms around the most critical factors affecting performance:
- Getting full value from Tableau Server
- Seeing what your users are experiencing from an analytical view
- Proactive troubleshooting
- Minimizing unplanned downtime
- Understanding Server loads and ability to enhance planning/maintenance
Let’s compare a couple of the tools out there on the market that help us gain better insight into our Tableau Server performance.
Tableau Server’s Admin Views
Tableau Server now has some features that help monitor the Server without leaving the application. You can look into the dashboards that dive deeper into activity, actions and background task information to get you started with basic things like disk space monitoring to begin checking the health and performance of your Server.
TabMon
TabMon is a performance monitoring agent that periodically samples target hosts for a set of Perfmon and MBean counters and writes out the results to a database or CSV file in a Tableau-friendly format. TabMon’s lighter weight and scalability increases its desirability as a monitoring tool.
LogShark
LogShark is a self-service tool that uses Tableau to analyze your Tableau Server and Desktop log files to troubleshoot performance and monitor Tableau usage. It builds workbooks that show Server details, identifies performance opportunities, helps minimize downtime and assists with error analysis. Unlike the other products, instead of real-time monitoring, it does zip log ingestion.
Power Tools for Tableau: Server
Power Tools for Tableau: Server provides the most comprehensive look at the health of Tableau Server. You can now sift through all the noise and target exactly what is causing slow load times, extract failures and other critical server issues. Power Tools: Server pulls these factors together into dashboards that contrast all the key hardware and software elements.
How Do Power Tools for Tableau: Server Differ?
TabMon and LogShark are community-based applications that take all the log files your Tableau Server outputs and compiles the information into a set of Tableau dashboards for a user-friendly representation of how the Server is operating.
Both tools are fully community supported and while they are available on GitHub, they do not come with a support platform to help in times of need or when you do not understand the information it is giving you. Updates for TabMon and LogShark are not always updated when breaking changes occur. This could mean a delay of weeks to sometimes months without the ability to use the tools. Finally, TabMon and LogShark must be run ad hoc while Power Tools for Tableau: Server is always monitoring.
If you’d like to see a complete side by side comparison, visit our Power Tools Community Forum and our Tableau Server Performance Monitoring PDF. To learn more about Power Tools for Tableau: Server please contact us below.