Tableau expands its data management capabilities with new Catalog

Tableau Software has announced the expansion of its Data Management offering with the launch of Tableau Catalog, a new set of capabilities that provide a complete view of all the data used in Tableau and enable improved visibility and enhanced data discovery - ensuring the right data is always used for analysis. Tableau also announced the general availability of the Tableau Server Management Add-On, a brand new offering designed to help customers more efficiently manage their enterprise-wide deployments of Tableau Server. Customers can add these offerings to their existing deployments by upgrading to Tableau 2019.3, which also includes Explain Data, Tableau’s new AI-powered functionality for automatic data insights.

Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer at Tableau, says, “As the amount of data increases and the pace of decision-making accelerates, the need for data management has never been more critical to foster a thriving data culture. With Tableau 2019.3, we’re integrating data management directly into the analytics experience, making it easier for customers to curate and prepare all the data needed for analysis and improving visibility and increasing trust in the data for everyone within an organization.”

Tableau Catalog enables IT and data owners to curate the data being used in Tableau, track how it’s being used across the organization, and alert people using or viewing the data of changes or data quality issues. Those performing analysis will be able to more easily find the data they’re looking for, understand what the data represents, and ultimately feel more confident that the insights they are providing are based on the right data.

Tableau’s Data Management Add-On, which now includes Tableau Catalog and Prep Conductor, will help customers better manage the data within their analytics environment, ensuring that up-to-date, trusted data is always used to drive decisions.

As organizations look to deploy analytics at unprecedented scale with Tableau, they are looking for tools to help streamline the management of large, mission-critical deployments. The Tableau Server Management Add-On is a new collection of features designed to address the unique security, manageability and scalability needs of enterprise customers. The new suite of capabilities include:

* Tableau Resource Monitoring Tool provides customers with insights around key factors that impact the health of large-scale deployments, like hardware utilization, VizQL sessions, data query performance, backgrounder workloads and more, enabling administrators to easily understand and precisely tune deployments to meet the unique needs of their business.

* Tableau Content Migration Tool simplifies content management workflows, making it easier to visually manage and schedule the movement of content between projects, sites or Tableau Server environments without any custom scripting.

* External Repository Hosting for Improved Scalability. To optimize the performance of large Tableau Server deployments hosted on AWS, customers can now choose to host their Tableau Server metadata repository externally with Amazon RDS Postgres, for increased scalability and availability.

* AWS Key Management Service Integration. For data extract encryption at rest, the Server Management Add-On also integrates with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for a centralized key management program with enhanced levels of security and compliance.

The Tableau Server Management Add-On is available for Tableau Server for $3.00 per user per month; it is not applicable to Tableau Online as Tableau already manages everything from scaling and performance to security as part of the Tableau Online SaaS offering.