UBS - Deploying Tableau at Scale

Paul Banoub

Runs a CoE (Centre of Excellence)

Self service model

Scalability

Ability to handle a growing amount of work

Scalability involves performance, maintenance and expenditure

14,000 unique monthly users on server now compared to starting this on a box under his desk

Infrastructure and Tableau Architecture

Online gives you scalability but you lose control of some elements (Postgres database)

48 core environment (v10.3)

Different environments: Production, DR, UAT, Engineering, alpha, beta and Tabjolt / tabmon/ Viz alerts

Build the relationships with the infrastructure departments to get the best of their support and facilities

Upgrades are great but increase require more hardware. You can disable if you need to.

Keep close to Postgres, you will be rewarded to do so

Use open source tools to help avoid harder challenges (like tabjolt / log shark / lumberjack etc). Tableau Replayer - can push historical logs back in to a server environment to show what has happened and why

Splunk to aggregate logs to then do the analysis and not be at risk of handling sensitive data

Service & Support

Use an appropriate service model - how much self-service vs governed?

Self service best for scalability as lowest central demand

Focus on talent recruitment and keep up with R&D

Beware of key dependencies

Efficiency - get the help requests to the right place - servicenow for tickets, Tableau Doctor for the harder stuff and forums for the questions

Users can not be trusted

Housekeeping - delete after 100 days, old subscriptions binned, long running extracts

Training and Community

Create a community with whichever social hub your company offers

Use Tableau champions as an extension of your team

Beware cultural challenges

Vendor & Costs

Customer success program pushing UBS to do more as much as UBS pushes Tableau

Understand your Total Cost of Ownership

Understand the other tools so you know whether they are good or not and why