How to Enable Tableau Prep Conductor

Automating your data prep workflows in Tableau is a game-changer, but before you can schedule your first flow, you need to enable Tableau Prep Conductor. This process unlocks the ability to centrally manage and run your Tableau Prep flows on a schedule, directly within Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud. This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions for getting it configured and ready to go.

What Exactly is Tableau Prep Conductor?

Tableau Prep Conductor is a feature within the Tableau ecosystem designed to operationalize the data preparation work you do in Tableau Prep Builder. While Prep Builder is the desktop tool for visually building your data cleaning and transformation flows, Prep Conductor is what allows you to automate them on your server environment. Think of it as the scheduler and manager for all your data prep jobs.

It's part of the broader Tableau Data Management add-on, a licensed suite of tools that also includes features like Tableau Catalog and data quality warnings. Without Prep Conductor, your data preparation remains a manual process, you'd have to open Prep Builder and run the flow yourself every time you needed updated data. With it, you can set your flows to run overnight, every hour, or on any custom schedule you define, ensuring your dashboards and data sources are always fresh.

Prerequisites: What You Need First

Before you jump into the technical steps, make sure you have the following prerequisites in place. This will save you a lot of time and potential frustration.

• Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud: You'll need an active installation of Tableau Server (self-hosted) or an account on Tableau Cloud (Tableau's SaaS environment).
• Tableau Data Management Add-on License: This is the most crucial part. Tableau Prep Conductor is not included with a standard Creator, Explorer, or Viewer license. It is a separate, paid add-on. You must have a valid license key for the Data Management Add-on to proceed. If you're unsure, check with your company's Tableau administrator or license manager.
• Administrative Permissions: You need to be a Server Administrator for Tableau Server or a Site Administrator for Tableau Cloud to enable and configure these settings.
• Tableau Prep Builder: While not required for enabling Prep Conductor, you'll need the Prep Builder desktop application to create and publish the flows that Conductor will eventually run.

How to Enable Tableau Prep Conductor on Tableau Server

For those managing their own Tableau Server instance, enabling Prep Conductor involves interacting with the Tableau Services Manager (TSM). This is the command-line tool used for server configuration, and we'll walk through the process together.

Step 1: Stop the Server (If Required)

While some license activations can happen while the server is running, it's often best practice, especially when changing configurations, to stop the server first. You'll need to do this from the command prompt on the machine running Tableau Server.

tsm stop

Step 2: Activate the Data Management Product Key

First, you need to tell your Tableau Server that you have a valid license for Data Management. You’ll need the product key, which can be found in your Tableau Customer Portal.

Open Command Prompt as an administrator on your primary Tableau Server node and run the following command, replacing <product_key> with your actual key:

tsm licenses activate -k <product_key>

You should see a confirmation message once the key is successfully activated.

Step 3: Enable the Tableau Prep Conductor Process

Activating the license makes the feature available, but it doesn't turn it on. You have to explicitly tell Tableau Server to enable the process for handling flows. This is done with another TSM command:

tsm configuration set -k flows.enabled -v true

This command flags the server to enable the infrastructure required for running flows.

Step 4: Apply Pending Changes and Restart the Server

After you’ve activated the license and enabled the feature, you must apply these changes. This command commits your configurations and will restart the Tableau Server services, so be sure you can afford a few minutes of downtime.

tsm pending-changes apply

When prompted, confirm with y. The process may take several minutes as Tableau Server reconfigures itself, applies the changes, and transparently starts back up for you.

Step 5: Verify That Prep Conductor is Active

Once the server is back up, it's time to confirm your work. Log in to your Tableau Server instance as a Server Administrator. Navigate to Settings > General. You should now see a settings section dedicated to "Tableau Prep Conductor," which confirms it has been enabled successfully. You can also run tsm status -v from the command line, and you should see services like flowprocessor_0 in a running state.

How to Enable Tableau Prep Conductor on Tableau Cloud

If you're using Tableau Cloud (formerly Tableau Online), the process is much simpler because Tableau manages all the backend infrastructure for you. There are no TSM commands to run.

Step 1: Purchase the Data Management Add-on

Just like with Tableau Server, Tableau Prep Conductor on Tableau Cloud requires the Data Management Add-on. Your primary task is to ensure your company’s Tableau Cloud subscription includes this add-on. If it doesn’t, you'll need to work with your Tableau account representative to add it to your license.

Step 2: Verify it's Enabled on Your Site

Once the Data Management Add-on is part of your Tableau Cloud subscription, Tableau automatically enables Prep Conductor on your site. There is no manual "on" switch for you to flip.

To verify it’s ready, log into your Tableau Cloud site and do the following:

• Navigate to the Explore section. You should see "Flows" as one of the top-level content types, alongside Workbooks and Data Sources.
• Publish a flow from Tableau Prep Builder to your Tableau Cloud site. During the publishing process, you will be given an option to set a schedule. This "Schedule" option only appears if Prep Conductor is active.

If you have the Data Management license but do not see these options, open a support ticket with Tableau, as it might be a provisioning issue on their end.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Sometimes things don't go as planned. Here are a few common hiccups and how to fix them.

Problem: The option to schedule flows is missing when publishing from Prep Builder.

• Cause on Server: You either haven't successfully activated the Data Management product key, or you forgot to run the tsm configuration set -k flows.enabled -v true and tsm pending-changes apply commands.
• Cause on Cloud: Your site most likely does not have the Data Management subscription added to it.
• Solution: For Server, re-run all the TSM commands in sequence. For Cloud, contact your Tableau Account Manager to confirm your subscription details.

Problem: A scheduled flow fails to run.

• Cause: This is typically a permissions or credentials issue. The "Run As" account for Tableau Server may not have access to a network file share the flow uses for input/output, or the embedded database credentials in the flow might be outdated or incorrect.
• Solution: Navigate to the flow in Tableau Server or Cloud, view its History, and check the error message. It will often point directly to the problem, such as "access denied" or "authentication failed." Edit the connection on the flow to update passwords or work with your IT team to grant the necessary file share permissions.

Problem: Flows are getting queued and taking a long time to run.

• Cause (Server-only): By default, an instance of Tableau Server may be configured to run only one or two flows concurrently. If you have many flows scheduled at the same time, a queue can form.
• Solution (Advanced): A Server Administrator can increase the number of flow processor processes on a node using TSM topology commands, such as tsm topology set-process. This allows more flows to run simultaneously, but it does require additional server resources (CPU and RAM). Be cautious and only increase this after analyzing your server's resource utilization.

Final Thoughts

Enabling Tableau Prep Conductor is the critical step to moving your data preparation from a manual-run, desktop-based process to a fully automated and centralized ETL pipeline. Once you have the necessary Data Management add-on license, the setup on Tableau Server is a straightforward series of TSM commands, and on Tableau Cloud, it's handled for you automatically.

After your cleaned, prepared data is automatically flowing into your dashboards, the next step is making sense of it all without getting buried in reports. This is where getting fast, clear answers becomes essential. We built Graphed to help with exactly that. At Graphed, we connect directly to your data sources and allow you to build dashboards and ask questions using simple, natural language. Instead of spending hours trying to wrangle chart types and filters, you can just ask, "Show me last quarter's sales trends by region," and get an instant visualization, freeing you up to act on your insights instead of just hunting for them.