A second look

Like the previous post, this one was born after a conversation with Sara Fernandes (Tableau Sales Area Manager), and like the previous post this one will be focused in Tableau, again talking about a novelty, the version 10.3 is the last released when this article was written.

One of the more interesting novelties are the “Data Driven Alerts”, which are fired when a given condition is reached by a measure over it has been set, this is as simple as useful.

To do the demo a little bit more interesting, instead of using a fictional business data set I decided to do a mini performance monitor over SQL Server with Tableau, using the tool to point to the Management Data Warehouse, obviously exists a lot of tools specialized in this kind of tasks, in this case, the objective is to show how to set data driven alerts over a given report.

Here are two prerequisites that must be accomplished to complete the demo, configure the SQL Server Management Data Warehouse and setup the SMTP configuration in Tableau Server.

To configure the SQL Server Management Data Warehouse, must be open the database instance and then go to the management folder, as seen in the following image:

 But this is not the post scope, to get further information go to this link, and to setup SMTP in Tableau Server, go to this link.

To create the report, open Tableau Desktop and the connect to SQL Server:

Set the connection parameters:

The Database to be used will be ManagementDW:

Don’t select tables, a custom SQL query will be written:

The previous selection will open a form like the following one:

It’s necessary to do a data conversion over the column collection_time because the native data type is DateTimeOffset which is not supported in Tableau, if this data type is used in a query, the column will be excluded in the output. The current demo will be composed by two reports, concurrent connections to SQL Server and index fragmentation in the database:

Now, a second connection must be created to place the query to extract the index fragmentation.

Again, connect to SQL Server.

And then write the query:

The next step is to build the report, here I’m not going to be deep in details because everybody already knows the Tableau capabilities, as I said previously, the scope of this post is to show the Data Driven Alerts.

Now, getting the index fragmentation, the graph will be this one:

The next step is upload the report into Tableau Server.

When the connection to Tableau Server is going to be stablished for first time, a prompt to input login and password will be show, then, the form to give the file name and set report option will be this:

Waiting a little bit while Tableau Server opens the report, we get:

And the report aspect will be:

Now, comes the most interesting part, to set the alert is necessary select a fixed axis where exists numeric values, because it will be used to set the limits values, in the current sample, the axis was remarked with a red rectangle:

Next step, click the alert button (marked in a green rectangle), setting the condition and setting the limit will act on the graph in the background, with a pink color to remark the values which fires the alert. At the end of this section is possible to find the alert recipients.

Set how to repeat the alerts

And finally this message appears (The alert was created successfully):

When the alert condition becomes true, an email is sent to the recipient set when the alert was created. In this case, I set up Tableau Server with my Gmail account and the recipient is my iCloud account. In a production environment, a corporative email server must be used and don’t forget to enable the relay operation from the machine where Tableau Server is installed, otherwise, the email will not be sent.

Para ir a la versión en castellano de este artículo hacer clic aquí.