How to See Who Viewed Tableau Dashboard

Knowing who uses your Tableau dashboards - and who doesn't - is essential for understanding their impact and improving their value. This article walks you through several methods to see viewer data, from a quick, built-in feature to creating your own comprehensive custom audit dashboards.

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Why Track Who Views Your Dashboards?

Before jumping into the "how," it's helpful to understand the "why." Tracking dashboard viewership isn't about micromanaging your users, it's about making data-driven decisions about your data assets. Here are a few key benefits:

• Measure Adoption and Engagement: The most basic question you can answer is, "Is anyone actually using this dashboard we spent weeks building?" High view counts signal success, while low engagement can indicate a problem with discoverability, relevance, or user training.
• Identify Power Users and Laggards: You can quickly find your data champions - the people who frequently use dashboards to inform their work. You can also identify individuals or teams who may need additional training or encouragement to adopt a more data-informed approach.
• Gather Feedback for Improvements: If a specific department isn't using a dashboard designed for them, it's a perfect reason to start a conversation. You might discover the dashboard is missing a key metric or is too complex, giving you direct feedback for your next iteration.
• Optimize Performance and Resources: Understanding which dashboards are heavily used helps you prioritize server resources and maintenance efforts. Unused dashboards can be archived, cleaning up the server and reducing clutter for everyone.

Method 1: The Quick and Easy Way with 'Who has seen this View?'

If you just need a quick snapshot of who has looked at a specific dashboard recently, Tableau has a simple, built-in feature for this on both Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud. This is the fastest way to get a high-level answer without digging into administrative tools.

How to Access This Feature:

1. Navigate to the dashboard (or "View" in Tableau's terminology) you want to investigate.
2. Locate the ... (More Actions) button, typically found near the dashboard's title.
3. In the dropdown menu, select "Who has seen this View?"

A small window will pop up showing a list of users who have recently viewed the specified dashboard. You will see the user's name and the last time they accessed it, usually with a relative timestamp like "Earlier today" or "Yesterday."

Limitations of This Method:

• It’s not exhaustive: For very popular dashboards with hundreds of viewers, this list may be capped and won't show every single person who has ever looked at it.
• It only shows recent activity: This tool is designed to show you who has been active lately. It doesn't provide a complete historical log of all views over months or years.
• No export or analysis features: You get a simple list. You can't filter, sort, or export this data for further analysis.

Despite its limitations, this method is perfect for a quick spot-check, like seeing if your manager has reviewed the latest performance dashboard you published.

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Method 2: Using Built-in Administrative Views

For a more detailed and analytical approach, Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud provide pre-built administrative dashboards. These are designed for Site or Server Administrators to monitor the health and usage of their Tableau environment. For tracking views, two of these are particularly useful.

To find them, navigate to the Site Status section of your Tableau Server or Cloud site.

1. Traffic to Views

This is your go-to report for understanding dashboard popularity. It provides an aggregate look at view traffic across your entire site. You can answer questions like:

• What are the most popular dashboards in the last 30 days?
• How many times was the Executive KPI Dashboard viewed this quarter?
• Are views trending up or down over time?

You can filter this report by project, publisher, timeframe, and more. While it shows the what (which dashboards are being viewed) very well, you need to click on individual marks or points on the graph to see the who (the specific users).

2. Actions by Specific User

This report flips the logic. Instead of starting with the dashboard, you start with the user. It allows you to select a specific user and see a log of all their actions on the site within a given timeframe. This includes:

• Logging in
• Accessing views (dashboards)
• Publishing content
• Creating subscriptions

This is extremely useful when you are helping a specific person or investigating why they can't find something. You can see their exact path and pinpoint any issues. By filtering for "access view" actions, you can get a complete history of every dashboard a particular user has looked at.

Together, these two administrative views give you powerful tools to analyze who is viewing what across your Tableau site without needing to build anything yourself.

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Method 3: Creating Custom Auditing Dashboards

For ultimate control and customization, advanced users can connect directly to the heart of Tableau Server: its PostgreSQL repository. This database contains all the metadata about your server's content, users, and activities - including every single interaction, like a dashboard view.

Note: This method applies to self-hosted Tableau Server installations. For Tableau Cloud, alternative methods such as APIs provide similar capabilities.

Step 1: Enable External Access to the PostgreSQL Repository

By default, you can't connect to this database from an external tool like Tableau Desktop. An administrator needs to enable it first using the Tableau Services Manager (TSM) command line interface.

First, enable access:

tsm data-access repository-access enable

Next, you must set a password for the readonly user. You will use this user to connect and query the data without any risk of accidentally changing anything.

tsm data-access repository-access set --repository-username readonly --repository-password YOUR_SECURE_PASSWORD_HERE

After running these commands, remember to apply the changes:

tsm pending-changes apply

Step 2: Connect with Tableau Desktop

Once access is enabled, you can connect from Tableau Desktop just like any other database:

1. Open Tableau Desktop and choose the PostgreSQL connector.
2. Enter the server's address, and use the Port 8060.
3. The database name is workgroup.
4. The username is readonly.
5. The password is the one you set in the previous step.

Once connected, you will see dozens of tables. For tracking views, you're primarily interested in a few key tables that you can join together:

• historical_events: This is the main transaction table. It logs every event that happens on the server. Each dashboard view is an event entry here.
• historical_event_types: This is a lookup table that tells you what each event means. For example, the type_id for "Access View" is 1.
• hist_views: Details about the views (dashboards) themselves.
• hist_users: Information about the user who performed the action.
• views: The current state of all views on the dashboard, helpful when linking historical data to content that is still actively used today.

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Step 3: Build Your Custom Dashboard

By joining these tables together in your Tableau Desktop data source using common identifiers like User ID and View ID, you can now create whatever analysis you're looking for. For example, you can create a simple table showing which users are viewing which dashboards:

1. Drag User Name (hist_users) and View Name (hist_views) to Rows.
2. Drag historical_event_id to Text to count the number of events.
3. To make sure you're only counting view access events, filter historical_event_types by "Access View".

From this starting point, you can create more advanced visualizations like a graph showing trends over time or a list of the most popular dashboards for each department. This level of analysis empowers you with flexibility and precision.

Final Thoughts

Tracking dashboard viewership can range from quick spot-checks using the "Who has seen this View?" feature to detailed analysis using administrative views or creating your custom dashboards. Whatever method you choose, this information helps you prove the value and improve the tools you build for your team.

While we love creating dashboards from scratch, accessing the Tableau Server Repository can sometimes be a technical challenge. A platform like Graphed, which simplifies this process, can be a valuable asset. Instead of connecting and stitching data yourself from different sources, Graphed connects your Tableau data sources in one platform, offering a seamless way to gain insights without the manual effort of exporting data. It gives you back time to spend on analysis, not manual data handling.