How to create a reusable analytics pane with the nested dashboards technique in Tableau

Tableau Cloud offers a starter kit for analyzing your Tableau site’s usage, providing log-like data sources and a pre-built workbook named Admin Insights Starter. While valuable, It may be located too far from the dashboards we design.

let me introduce a method to seamlessly share usage analytics directly at the dashboard level, where it rightfully belongs — within the dashboard itself!

Final Result: https://public.tableau.com/views/BigLittleTips-NestedDashboards-AnalyticsPane/Sales

This technique has been shared at VizIt Berlin in 2023, during Ivett Kovács and I #BigLittleTips Live session. Find more BigLittleTips on Ivett Medium account: https://medium.com/@yvette110

Overview

You will leverage a technique I call nested dashboards, or dashboards embedded into dashboards.

Requirements

You need a Tableau Cloud with access to the TS Events datasource located in the Admin Insight project. Feel free to customize this tutorial using logs from your on-premise Tableau Server.

Advantages

Key advantages of this technique:

1. Reusable Design: Build the analytics pane once and effortlessly reuse it across multiple dashboards.
2. Ease of Maintenance: Enjoy simplicity as all changes automatically propagate into every deployed instance.
3. Efficiency in Implementation: Swiftly incorporate the analytics pane into diverse dashboards with just a few clicks!

Technique Overview

We will follow these four steps:

• accessing the TS Events datasource from Tableau Cloud
• creating and publishing the analytics pane dashboard
• embedding in the final dashboards
• publishing to Tableau Cloud

Step 1: Accessing the TS Events datasource

The TS Events datasource offers logs about actions performed by end-users on your Tableau Cloud site such as as dashboard access, logins, and publishing.

Create a new datasource on a Tableau Desktop workbook and access the TS Events datasource by searching in the already published datasources in your Tableau Cloud site. Select it and click “connect”.

Please be aware that I will use a simplified version of this datasource for the Tableau Public version.

Step 2: Creating and publishing the analytics pane

Feel free to generate any required sheets for your dashboard analytics. I’ll proceed by crafting two specific sheets:

• Area Chart: display views and viewers over time. I implement a parameter param_item_name , and a test on dashboard names Item Name I add in my metric calculations. Consider applying a similar approach to filter by Workbook Nameor opt for Item Idto account for shared dashboard names on the server.

Area Chart — views and viewers over time

• Table: list time since last login by viewers. I introduce an additional calculation to determine the time difference between each viewer’s last login event and the admin insight publication date. Filtering has been applied using the test on param_item_name.

Table — time since last login by viewers

Next, create a dashboard with a compact width tailored to match the dimensions of our upcoming slide-over panel. Incorporate the previously crafted sheets into the dashboard.

Lastly, publish the dashboard on your Tableau Cloud, and feel free to do so within a dedicated project.

We build this dashboard once, but we will use many times, in many places.

Step 3: Embedding in the final dashboards

Now, to integrate the analytics pane dashboard into existing workbooks and dashboards, let’s start by adding a web object to one of your dashboards. Afterward, empower the user to control its visibility by adding a Show/Hide button to the web object, allowing them to decide when to display it on the screen.

Dashboard Sales with Analytics Pane web object

The web object should reference the url of the analytics pane dashboard you just created, plus the following options:

• Apply a filter based on the current workbook/dashboard name that you are working within. For instance, I reuse param_item_name with a specific value, such as param_item_name=Sales.
• Embed the view: embed=yes, showShareOptions=false, toolbar=no.

Your URL should look like this:

https://dub01.online.tableau.com/#/site/{your_site}/views/{your_analytics_pane_workbook}/{your_analytics_pane_dashboard}?%3Aembed=yes&:showShareOptions=false&:toolbar=no&param_item_name=Sales

You can add the same web object to every dashboards, just change the URL to filter on the right workbook/dashboard name.

Dashboard Shipments with Analytics Pane web object

Please note that I replicate this behaviour using a different URL formatting approach for the Tableau Public version.

Step 4: Publishing to Tableau Server/Online

The final step involves (re)publishing the edited workbook/dashboards to Tableau Cloud. Navigate to the “Server” menu and choose the appropriate option for your publication.

Going further

As already mentioned, feel free to customize this tutorial using logs from your on-premise Tableau Server!