Explore Tableau Cloud Site Capacities
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- List the different Tableau Cloud site capacities.
- Describe the impact to viewers when limits are reached.
Introduction
Now that you’ve learned how to connect to all of your various data sources, you might be tempted to connect to everything under the sun. Because Tableau Cloud is a shared resource that operates multiple customer tenants securely on a single pod, Tableau has to ensure that no single deployment uses more than its fair share of resources. In this unit, you learn how to manage storage and data capacity on Tableau Cloud for optimal performance and usability for your own sites and the others deployed on the same pod.
Note: The capacity information in this unit refers to the capacity for each site in your Tableau Cloud Manager (TCM) tenant, the top-level administrative layer that manages your organization’s Tableau Cloud deployment. Depending on your license type, the scope can be different with product changes including total sites available, amount of storage, concurrent jobs, and amount of users.
Storage Capacity
Each Tableau Cloud site has a specific storage limit that’s essential for maintaining performance and manageability. A Standard Edition site has a total storage limit of 1 TB, which includes data source extracts, published data sources, and workbooks. The Enterprise and Tableau+ editions have higher site storage limits than the Standard edition. Administrators need to understand these limits to ensure a smooth experience for users.
For site admins to manage storage effectively, it’s a best practice for project leaders and content owners to regularly check their storage usage. The Tableau Cloud Admin Insights project, which provides detailed insights into storage consumption, is the easiest way to monitor storage capacity.
Users and Tableau Cloud site administrators can manage storage by deleting unused content and optimizing data extracts to reduce their size. When you keep storage usage within the allocated limit, you can prevent potential publishing degradation.
Data Capacity
Besides the risk of simply “filling up” your Tableau Cloud with outdated or unused content that takes space but provides no value, a site full of unnecessarily large pieces of content can cause bad user experiences like:
- Slow-loading dashboards, views, and metrics
- Long-running data extract refreshes
- Error messages that are confusing to end users
- Unexpected load on the original data source
In a Tableau Server deployment, an admin can bypass these issues by configuring Tableau Server to allow longer queries. However, in Tableau Cloud, timeouts are in place to avoid hardware resource exhaustion across all environments. These timeouts limit both the size of the query and how long queries are allowed to run.
Although there are site limits to query size and time, MuleSoft and Hyper API can help you get especially large amounts of data into Tableau Cloud and keep them refreshed. That said, the following are the hard limits to Tableau Cloud content size that can’t be bypassed with these tools.
- An individual piece of content must not exceed 15 GB (or 25 GB with the Enterprise and Tableau+ editions).
- Attached files (.csv, .pdf, .xlsx, and so on) must not exceed 1 GB when uncompressed.
Job Concurrency Scope
Each site on Tableau Cloud has specific concurrent capacities for different job types. The license types and the number of Creator licenses you purchase determine the limits for each job type in Tableau Cloud. Jobs types on Tableau Cloud include:
- Extract refreshes
- Subscriptions
- Flows
- Metrics
- Total time spent on all jobs
As you now know, with Tableau Cloud, you don’t have to worry about managing hardware and capacity–Tableau has that covered for you. However, when too many jobs run simultaneously, they can experience longer run times or even fail to complete due to concurrency scope. Fortunately, many customers find the Tableau Cloud concurrency limits are greater than what their current Tableau Server backgrounders can handle today. If you’re managing a particularly extract-heavy environment, read up on the latest Tableau recommendations to optimize your extracts.
In addition to the capacity described, a site comes with designated capacity for command-line and API calls. If the number of calls exceeds the command-line or API calls for actions described, you can still use REST API methods and tabcmd for programmatic site administration and fine-tuning. For more information, review the Tableau Developer Platform module.
Let’s Recap
In this unit, you learned about Tableau Cloud site capacities and best practices for maintaining them. In summary: Regularly review and clean up unused content to free up storage space, optimize data extracts to reduce storage usage, and monitor user activity and adjust user roles as needed. Next, you explore the Tableau Cloud migration process.