Tableau Reports Optimisation

About Client

The client is a global event management company based in Chicago with a strong presence in the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East.

Challenge

  • Client was facing issues due to less usable (un-optimized) reports generated using Tableau
  • The Tableau reports had to be accessed simultaneously by most of the organization, which accounts to nearly 1500 business users. This impacted the report generation as it slowed down the entire process significantly.
  • The report generation time-frame had to be brought down to increase usability of reports throughout the organization.
  • Other factors that contributed to the problem were the un-optimized hardware that was running on legacy servers. There were also issues pertaining to Virtual environment/ Shared Infrastructure.

Our Solution

Various Data points were gathered and considered to identify the slow nature of report generation including-

  • Tableau Processes and Execution Times for 25, 50, 75 and 100 concurrent users
    Server RAM, CPU, I/O utilization during Reports’ execution
    Tableau performance monitor and other tools were used as a part of the evaluation
  • After analyzing the data sets, dashboard-specific and generic tableau environment problems were identified which caused the slowdown.
  • Various settings of items were iterated and a feasible solution was selected as per client’s need-
  • Dashboard Design: Dashboard Specific
    Tableau Extract Query: Dashboard Specific
    DB Table Structure: Dashboard Specific
    Tableau Server Configuration: Impacts all dashboards
    Hardware and Infrastructure: Impacts all dashboards

Outcome

Dashboard response times for all required dashboards reduced to

8 seconds
from the previous response time of 1-1.5 minutes

91.11%
optimization achieved.

  • The refresh time for Tableau Extract noticeably reduced in the process.
  • In turn, Dashboard designs were optimized to cater to client needs
  • Tableau utilization increased in general across the organization due to better user experience and engagement.