Guest access is enabled to my Tableau Server yet at random times the server won't allow guest users to access content they have permission to. This happened to me just this morning. No settings for the server have changed, guest permissions are enabled for the dashboard, all data sources are embedded, and yet any external users were prompted to sign in when attempting to view the dashboard. Fast forward 4 hours later, nothing has changed, and yet guest users can now view the content without issue - no sign in required. Is there a setting or something that I am missing? Why does this happen at seemingly random times? I don't believe the issue is stemming from the background cache just because I never cleared mine and the issue resolved itself. I honestly don't know what to do, my IT department doesn't, and neither do the Tableau Server Admins. Please help.
it is a technical topic that requires investigation end to end and as there no technical information provided, I can phrase some to guide you and that would be helpful to know. But honestly your Tableau Server admins should take ownership, knowing that I don't know your role.
So if I understand well your Tableau Server instance has a core license with guest account enabled to bypass authentication when sharing dashboards.
Some questions:
- How the external users are accessing the dashboards, through a direct shared link to click or are the dashboards embedded in a web platform ?
- Are sign-outs occurring after user inactivity ?
- Is refreshing the browser displays the dashboards successfully afterwards ?
- Tableau Server is single node or a cluster ?
- Is there a reverse proxy or load balancer in front of your Tableau Server instance ?
- Are the external users using any proxy or vpn ?
- You said "
external users were prompted to sign in when attempting to view the dashboard", do you have a screenshot to illustrate what kind of sign-in prompt we are talking about ?
- Did the Tableau Server admins customise any Tableau gateway session duration/lifetime key(s) ?
That's it for now.
