Enabling The Tableau Blueprint
Framework With Wiiisdom Ops

Enable Tableau Blueprint With Wiiisdom Ops

If you believe in data-driven organizations, governance or you’re convinced that Tableau Blueprint is the only way to scale your Tableau deployment (as seen in our previous two articles about the framework and why it should be put in place), you might now be facing the challenge of actually implementing repeatable processes within your organization. The solution? Wiiisdom Ops. Here at Wiiisdom, we are Tableau Blueprint enablers providing you and your whole organization the keys to successful analytics.

Without a doubt, implementing governance at scale is a real challenge because technology and people become allies. It raises questions such as: How do you make sure that your new dashboards are deployed successfully? How can users be sure a change on their dashboard hasn’t impacted all of the others? How do you measure and ensure user adoption?

Fortunately, Wiiisdom Ops is an agile solution that removes these questions of doubt and enables you to automate your Tableau testing to ensure trusted analytics at all times. With our solution, you can enable Tableau Blueprint successfully to achieve the goal of being a data-driven organization.

Wiiisdom Ops And The Ride To Agility

The first path on the Tableau Blueprint subway is towards Agility with the aim of creating a stable, secure, and trusted environment for users through a combination of controls, roles, and repeatable processes, in other words, governance. Tableau users manipulate data through formatting, filtering, and calculation, but when creating dashboards how can users be reassured that the data can be trusted? It is actually impossible without testing and certifying content and data. Through Deployment, Monitoring, and Maintenance under the Tableau Blueprint’s trusted and governed umbrella, organizations can be assured that their data is governed and verified.

So, how can Wiiisdom Ops help you on these three station stops? Let me explain: 

Deployment

Quality in analytics is a must-have when making business-critical decisions based on data. At this station stop, validating data against expected results is key in ensuring trusted analytics. 

When deploying new dashboards or recently updated/improved ones to your server, you need to ensure that everything is working as expected, whether that be about performance, layout, navigation, or data. The deployment must be automated and governed so that there are no issues in production. CI/CD principles focus on automating the lifecycle of development, and, applied to Analytics and Tableau, focuses on testing your dashboards before delivering them to your users. In other words, you develop your dashboard, you test it against expected results such as data retrieval and response time, then if the test is a success, you deploy it in production and if not, you fix it and you test it again. Doing this will ensure that you certify all dashboards before they get delivered to users. 

Note that governance is also very important at the Tableau Datasource level and this is also something Wiiisdom Ops can help you govern. 

Monitoring

There can be many things to monitor within a Tableau environment with the added risk of not having enough time to monitor them all. This is also often done manually and so can be very error-prone. With Wiiisdom Ops, you can set up automated testing to monitor your Tableau dashboards in Production, where it really matters the most. Even better, any testing can be scheduled so you can literally (in the words of Tableau) “set it and forget it”. This article will explain in detail how to set up Test-Driven Development for your Tableau platform. You can also discover how BI testing solutions can improve your Tableau Server monitoring strategy in this article.

At this station stop, we’d recommend carrying out these types of testing: 

Functional Testing 

Functional testing allows you to simulate user journeys, clicks and any interactions users do on a dashboard. This can vary from simulating users logging in to Tableau to them clicking on a filter within a dashboard. In essence, this testing ensures users can consume and interact with their data easily. Functional testing will allow dashboard developers to find any errors before the users do and thus improve the user experience.

Performance Testing 

Testing the performance of your Tableau environment is equally important to measure the response time against SLA requirements and drive load to your Tableau Server. By automating this type of testing, it will allow you to determine capacity needs for future upgrades and new Tableau releases. Doing this will reassure users that the Tableau environment will continue to perform as normal. 

Wiiisdom Ops can also test content performance where it will test how long it takes to open a visualization, how to long it takes to apply a filter, and the time it takes for the data to appear after applying that mark.