If you’re a Tableau Server administrator or publisher of content to Tableau Server, then you probably at some point wondered how popular your dashboards and views are. Tableau fortunately has a simple answer to that with their Server Admin views. If you’ve ever wanted to know even more about how your users are using your views, then this post is for you.

Google offers an incredible free service that helps us to track many areas of interest called Google Analytics. You can sign up for free here: http://www.google.com/analytics/

Ignore the pie charts they display and go sign up for an account if you haven’t already.

Once you’ve set up your Google Analytics account, you’ll need to add some javascript code to your Tableau Server pages to get this going. Before I show you how to do this, I must warn you – this is modifying the source code of Tableau Server. If you call support, they may be unhappy and not help you; unless you revert back to the original code base. Okay, with that said, here we go:

You’ll need system admin rights on the Windows Server hosting Tableau itself.

1.  Navigate to the following location on your Tableau Server:

C:Program Files (x86)TableauTableau Server7.0wgserverz5WEB-INFappviewslayouts

2. Make a copy of all the files in that directory and put them in a safe place (eg. source control, DropBox, etc.).
3. Open each file. Before the last closing