Track and Understand Tableau Dashboard Usage with a Free and Open-Source Extension

Istvan Korompai
HCLTech-Starschema Blog
3 min readJul 12, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that Tableau Usage Tracker, Starschema’s Tableau extension for measuring and understanding dashboard usage, is now free and open-source. To help you make the most of the software, we’ve put together a quick-start guide — read on to get tracking in no-time!

Photo by Raphael Nogueira on Unsplash

Tableau Usage Tracker enables you to easily measure and understand how people consume and interact with dashboards. Tracker can anonymously collect data based filter changes — including selection of marks — for every single user to give you the insights you need to create better visualizations and optimize performance.

How it works:

  • Anonymous data collection: Tableau Usage Tracker was built for the GDPR era, created with privacy-by-design in mind. It does not collect personally identifiable information from users like ID, name or email address.
  • Track every click in Tableau: Track and analyze filter changes, filter states, window size, workbook ID, session time and more right within Tableau.
  • Pre-built Insights Dashboard: Understand behavior patterns using the built-in dashboard created by Starschema’s dataviz experts.

How to get started:

To set up the extension, see https://tableau-tracker-trial.starschema.com/help/index.html or Tracker’s GitHub page for a step-by-step guide.

Once it’s up and running, use our Web Data Connector to access your data /wdc endpoint and download the example workbook /example/Tableau_Tracker_Demo.twbxto see a sample tracking dataset in action.

It should look like this:

This demo dashboard will not connect to your data, but it’s an important point of reference that should give you understanding of how we envision Tableau Usage Tracker being used in the wild.

Highlights in this dashboard include most of the top-row metrics (Bounce rate, AVG Session Length and AVG Interactions/Session) and the “When do my users visit” heatmap in the lower right corner. These enable Google Analytics-type insights that, in our experience, most analytics teams have difficulty accessing.

When you build your own dashboard to visualize Tracker insights, simply copy the calculations from the demo dashboard and cherry-pick the metrics you wish to include. Note Tracker also natively enables you to track filter combinations, even though they’re not included in the demo dashboard.

Once your Tracker dashboard is ready, it’s up to you how you leverage your newly-unlocked insights — we’re excited to see how the community will use this tool and what they will add to it.

If you’d like to find out more about Tableau Usage Tracker and how to make the most of it, visit the extension’s GitHub page.

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