Often we heard enterprise Tableau customers had all kinds of challenges to upgrade their Tableau servers. This webinar invited the super experienced Tableau server admin talking about our own experiences of upgrading very large Tableau servers.
For those who use Tableau Online, you do not have to worry about server upgrade. But for those who have on-premier servers, the server has to be upgraded to leverage Tableau’s new features.
1. How often to upgrade Tableau server?
We did a quick pull during webinar with 50+ responses. The data shows 50% Tableau server upgrade once/year, 30% twice/year and 20% 3+/year.
We have two super large Tableau servers. One server got upgraded 2 times/year and another one 3-4 times/year.
We strongly recommend most Tableau server admins should upgrade your servers 2+ times/year as the server admins are between Tableau’s new features and your user adoption of those features.
2. What to do pre-upgrade
- Strategic Upgrade Approach
- Planning – minimum disruption to users
- Upgrade test:
- Test in Prod Like env and Data
- Run all extracts once to compare failure rate and avg execution time
- Make publishers accounted for their own workbook test/validation
- No need to over test
- Platform Health Check
- Server State
- Memory related issues
- Are services crashing
- Do we have adequate storage
- Can natives/firewall cause an issue
Tips: Very often Tableau sever upgrade have issues due to things outside Tableau app – means platform level issues. Upgrade more often actually help to resolve those issues.
3. What to do During Upgrade
4. What if Upgrade Failed
Re-Cap:
- Upgrade Tableau server twice a year
- Choose the latest version when upgrade
- Pre-upgrade tasks include system health, OS health and test
- Test new version in Prod like server env with prod like dataset
- Know what to monitor and how to monitor during upgrade
- Ensure a good backup before upgrade and be prepared to reinstall server from scratch and restore with backup data as plan B