Overcome the Challenges of Tableau Cloud Forced Upgrades with Wiiisdom

How to Overcome the Challenges with Tableau Cloud Forced Upgrades

In an era where data drives decisions, many organizations are eager to jump on the Tableau Cloud bandwagon, primarily to embrace AI capabilities. Maybe you are already planning or assessing the possibility of moving to Tableau Cloud, but the journey to Tableau Cloud is marked by certain challenges, with forced upgrades being one of your concerns. Yet, this is where Wiiisdom can help overcome this risk thanks to our automated testing capabilities (remember, testing doesn’t stop once you’ve migrated 😉). This article will look at how organizations can overcome the fears and challenges related to forced upgrades.

How Wiiisdom Mitigates Tableau Cloud Upgrade Risks

We understand the worries behind Tableau Cloud upgrades. Albeit designed to keep your Tableau platform secure and up-to-date with the latest functionalities, these forced upgrades can often cause unexpected changes that may affect your dashboards (especially business-critical dashboards where there can be no room for error), reports, and data sources. These concerns are even more heightened in highly regulated environments, such as for pharmaceutical companies or financial institutions (to overcome this obstacle, Tableau are releasing a new feature in Tableau+ called Release Preview sites that allow organizations to test in advance an upcoming Tableau Cloud release). And this is only when you notice the unexpected changes, it could be worse, what if you don’t notice them?

Let’s take the example of one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. They are currently moving to Tableau Cloud (100K users), but the forced upgrades pose a critical hurdle to them. They’re concerned that their testing timelines may not be long enough to have full qualification and validation before each Tableau Cloud upgrade, which is released every four months. Additionally, they often want to remediate issues and defects before going live and will hold a deployment until everything is fully qualified and validated. But with forced upgrades, this won’t be possible because Tableau takes care of updates, monitoring, and infrastructure maintenance. You’ll finish your day and then the next morning, you’ve been upgraded!

The good news is that these concerns can be mitigated with Wiiisdom. Wiiisdom ensures your Tableau content is always accurate and reliable after every upgrade. Here’s how:

Automated Validation

Wiiisdom specializes in governance for analytics content and BI platforms with automated validation being at the heart of it. Our solutions allow you to put in place continuous automated test cadences so you can quickly identify and address any issues introduced by the upgrade. Here you would create regression test cases and apply them to all your content. In reality, most of our customers identify data-sensitive or business-critical reports and run regular quality checks to then be notified in case of any unwanted changes. In this scenario, they would test a set of workbooks prior to and after the upgrade to determine if there were any changes.

Dashboard Certification and Decertification

We know how important it is to have trust you can see on your Tableau platform. How often have you asked yourself this question: “Is my Tableau content accurate, recent, and reliable for decision-making?” With Wiiisdom, you can now deliver trusted analytics and reporting by automating certification and decertification for Tableau data sources and dashboards. It provides you and your users with a visual confirmation that what they’re viewing has been tested and certified for accuracy after every upgrade. Wiiisdom is a pioneer in this field with this unique capability being granted a U.S. patent. Our free extension is available on Tableau Exchange!

It’s important to continually check the health of your platform to ensure decisions are made on accurate and reliable data and analytics. Wiiisdom’s Predictive Monitoring solution helps you anticipate performance issues, proactively identify high-footprint dashboards and data sources, and prevent disruptions before they impact users or budgets. It avoids platform instability and a poor user experience, so your Tableau platform is always ready to deliver insights, without the guesswork.

Notifications

You can set up notifications if a test fails, making developers proactive in fixing the issues as quickly as possible.

All the above also apply to any forced upgrade. Nowadays, organizations are surrounded by multiple forced upgrades such as in the database, in the ETL, etc, and an analytics testing solution like Wiiisdom should be used daily in multi-Cloud solution environments (Tableau Cloud, Snowflake, etc). We help mitigate the risk of untrusted data analytics ensuring organizations are making the best decisions.

Red Hat migrated to Tableau Cloud and these forced upgrades were a big concern for them. Discover how they overcame this challenge with Wiiisdom.