Tableau Webhooks

What are Webhooks?

Webhooks are one way that apps can send automated messages or information to other apps.

For Tableau Server/Online, this means that events in Tableau can send automated messages and kick off actions in other apps.

What can you do with them?

Here are some cool examples of things you can do with Tableau’s Webhooks:

• Celebrate team accomplishments by sending a Slack message to your team’s channel when a new workbook is published.
• Integrate processes by adding a task to your team's task/project management system (Jira, Asana, Monday, etc) when a datasource refresh fails.
• Notify your followers on Twitter whenever your workbook refreshes successfully. Because who wouldn’t want to do this?

There are tons of possibilities. Most of the time, if you can think it, you can build it!

What events in Tableau Server/Online can be used with webhooks?

Here are the events in Tableau Server/Online that can trigger webhook posts.

This list is current as of September 30th, 2020

• Data Source
• Updated
• Created
• Deleted
• Data Source Refresh
• Refresh Started
• Refresh Succeeded
• Refresh Failed
• Workbooks
• Updated
• Created
• Deleted
• Workbook Refresh
• Refresh Started
• Refresh Succeeded
• Refresh Failed

What do you need in order to use these?

• Postman
• For more information on using Postman for all things APIs, check out Postman’s Learning Center.
• If you would rather set up the webhook using cURL, check out Tableau's cURL documentation here.
• Postman collection for Tableau Webhooks
• Be a Tableau administrator on either your Tableau Online or Tableau Server on version 2019.4 or later.
• If you want to test this out on a sandbox site, join the Tableau Developer Program. It’s free and gives you a sandbox account to try out Webhooks and all the other great Tableau Developer Tools.
• If you want to learn more about Tableau Developer Tools and how they can help you, I recently gave a talk about it that you can watch here.
• A third party service to accept the request and kick off other parts of the workflow.
• Popular services that can do this for free are IFTTT, Automate.io, and Zapier
• A can do attitude! (only slightly optional)

How do you set them up?

Step 1: Create a Personal Access Token in Tableau Server/Online

Log in to your Tableau Site and navigate to your user page. Under settings, scroll down to Personal Access Tokens. Enter a name for your token and select the Create New Token button.

You will need to copy the name and following token to a safe place for use later in the process.

Step 2: Authenticate in Postman

Open Postman.

Open the Sign In (personal access token) json file. Paste in your site name. For my Tableau Online site, it is my assigned site name that is at the end of my Online URL.

https://10ax.online.tableau.com/#/site/CopyThisPartHere

After sending the request, save the resulting token as an environment variable for use later.

Step 3: Set Up Your Third Party Service

Go into your third-part service of choice (ex.  IFTTT, Automate.io, or Zapier). For this post, I will be using Automate.io.

Create your trigger.

Create a new bot with a Webhook as the trigger. When you click Setup Webhook, you will be shown a url. Copy this url to your clipboard. You will use this in our next step when you setup the webhook in Postman.

Create your action.

Then choose the action that you want to kick off when your bot is triggered. You can choose almost anything!

• Send a slack message
• Send an email
• Add a task to your task manager
• Turn on you Hue Lights. (Just because you could do this does not mean that you should…🤷‍♂️)

Step 4: Set Up the Webhook Using Postman

Open the Create a webhook json file. You will see the following request under the Body header. There are three things you need to change to finalize the request.

• Add the name of the event that you want to use to trigger the webhook. Use the phrase from the webhook-source name listed in this table.
• Add the webhook url from your third-party service that you set up as part of Step 3. This tells Tableau where to send a packet of data when the event occurs.
• Create a name for your webhook. This is to help you identify webhooks when you review them later on.

Here is an example of what a completed request looks like.

That is all there is to it!

You can use the List webhooks json file to see which webhooks are set up on your site and what url they are sending packets of data to when their specific events are triggered.

More Resources

If you want to learn more about Tableau’s webhooks, check out these resources.

Tableau’s Official Webhook Documentation

Webhooks Post by Andre De Vries

Webhooks Post By Anya Presvetova

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