Curiosity Killed the Cloud

Tableau Public servers are overwhelmed

 

Tableau Software, the now-publically traded darling (NYSE symbol DATA) of the data visualization industry, has a lot of curious prospective users. But overwhelming curiosity translates into overwhelming traffic for their servers. I was hoping to use Tableau Public to see what it could do with a Microsoft Excel export my Google Analytics (Tableau Desktop can connect directly to Google Analytics but (free) Tableau Public is more limited). I was greeted with the following message.

Saving to Tableau Public is temporarily unavailable.

Due to overwhelming traffic on our servers, saving to Tableau Public is temporarily disabled. We appreciate your patience as we work to get this fixed. Please try again later.

No doubt Tableau puts more cloud horsepower behind its new paid offering, Tableau Online. But I’m pretty sure that I’m not alone in having concerns about availability of cloud services.

In any case, I’m sure it feels nice to be wanted.

Dallas Marks

Dallas Marks

I am an analytics and cloud architect, author, and trainer. An AWS certified blogger, SAP Mentor Alumni and co-author of the SAP Press book SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence: The Comprehensive Guide, I prefer piano keyboards over computer keyboards when not blogging or tweeting.

2 thoughts on “Curiosity Killed the Cloud

  1. Hi Dallas,
    I’m sorry you experienced a problem yesterday. One of my colleagues flagged this internally at Tableau HQ. We ended up with a pretty long email thread trying to work out what might have happened. Internally there were no flagged errors with Tableau Public or Tableau Online yesterday. The only thing we think may have happened is that you tried to save at the exact moment we were doing some final maintenance uploads to our servers.

    As a result of this post and your tweet we’ve identified an edge case situation where users can see this message even where there is no problem with our servers.

    What this makes us realize is that our error message is incorrect. You should have seen a “We are doing some maintenance on Tableau Public” message instead.

    Can I ask how often you publish to Public/Online and how many times you have seen this?

    Best wishes
    Andy Cotgreave
    Social Content Manager, Tableau

    1. Andy,

      Thank you for the follow up. I assumed the glitch was momentary and it was indeed the first (and only) time I’ve seen the error. The point of my article wasn’t that the Tableau Public site was down, but that it must be extremely popular. Rapid growth can sometimes be a curse as much as a blessing.

      In any case, thank you for the follow up and best wishes.

      Regards,
      Dallas

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