Advance with Assist shares quick solutions to common challenges encountered by the InterWorks Assist on-demand team.

Question: I’ve published my data source to Server and set the refresh schedule, but the refresh keeps failing with the error message “Connectionless Failure.”  What am I missing here to get this working?

I’ve seen this message many times over the years. It’s more generic than other error messages because this one can have a variety of causes. The basic error here is that Tableau Server can’t connect to the location of the data you are trying to refresh. I’ll cover the main issue we see the majority of the time that, conveniently, is the reason this extract failed as well.

Consider the Data Connection

Let’s start by thinking about the data connection. This user had connected to a data file that was local to their shared network. The location of the file was on a mapped drive I: nested in project folders:

Here’s where the issue starts. Tableau Server is its own computer with its own drives. By mapping a drive on your local machine, Tableau Server’s machine will not have this same location specified, so when it tries to refresh the extract at the location, it won’t be seen because its I: drive will be blank:

The easiest solution here is to update the connection so that it no longer uses the mapped drive, but instead it uses the full UNC path to the file location in the connection itself.

Now, at the beginning of this post, I mentioned there are numerous things that could throw this error message. If you switch to the full UNC path and the error is still there, what else can you check?

Other Factors to Consider

If you are the Tableau Server administrator, you can open the Background Tasks area of the Tableau Server screens to search for the associated failed task; this is indicated by a red X. When you hover over that mark, you will see a secondary error message. This may provide you with more information as to why the error is occurring and give you more troubleshooting steps to navigate through.

One that comes to mind is drive security with a username and password for shared drives. Don’t forget that your Tableau Server has a domain account that may need to be granted access before it would be able to connect.