UBS – Tips for Building a Scalable Enterprise Deployment of Tableau

Paul Banoub

Director, Analytics as a Service

UBS

# T C 1 8

Internal

October 2018

Paul Banoub

UBS – Tips for Building a Scalable Enterprise Deployment of Tableau

Taking your Tableau service from zero to hero

Director, Analytics as a Service

Gold!ProfitRegions

EmployeesHeadquartersFounded 1862

Who are UBS?

Sources: UBS website, Wikipedia

UBS provides financial advice and solutions to wealthy, institutional and corporate clients worldwide, as well as private clients in Switzerland. The operational structure of the Group is comprised of our Corporate Center and five business divisions: Wealth Management, Wealth Management Americas, Personal & Corporate Banking, Asset Management and the Investment Bank. UBS's strategy builds on the strengths of all of its businesses and focuses its efforts on areas in which it excels, while seeking to capitalize on the compelling growth prospects in the businesses and regions in which it operates, in order to generate attractive and sustainable returns for its shareholders. All of its businesses are capital-efficient and benefit from a strong competitive position in their targeted markets.

Headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, UBS has offices in 54 countries, including all major financial centers, and employs approximately 60,000 people. UBS Group AG is the holding company of the UBS Group. Under Swiss company law, UBS Group AG is organized as an Aktiengesellschaft, a corporation that has issued shares of common stock to investors.

Who are UBS?

Source: UBS

A center of excellence (CoE) is a team, a shared facility or an entity that provides leadership, best practices, research, support and/or training for a focus area. (Wikipedia)

What I do

I run a visual analytics CoE based on

Vendor & costsTraining & communityService model & support

Tableau architectureInfrastructure

In the next 35-ish minutes

Scalability principles

Tableau at UBS

The UBS Tableau COEA Data Visualisation shared service & Centre of Excellence

Outstanding Product Knowledge Manage the UBS Tableau Infrastructure Drive Visual Analytics Best Practices

Training Syllabus & Dr. Sessions

Social Community & Enablement

Vendor RelationshipsConsultancy Relationships

Network & Tableau Community Passionate Data People

For more on the UBS COE

And COE in general…

Let’s talk about scala-bi-l-ity

Scalability

OR

Scalability is the capability of a system, network, or process to screw up your life and turn your family into strangers

Scalability is the capability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of work, or its potential to be enlarged to accommodate that growth

Bondi, André B. (2000).

Characteristics of scalability &

impact on performance.

Proceedings of the second

international workshop on Software

and performance – WOSP '00. p. 195.

Banoub, Paul. (2018). Tableau

Conference 2018, New Orleans,

USA – just now

Basically, don't be this guy

He didn't think about the dimensions of scalability

• Amdahl's Law

• Returns begin to diminish

Performance

• Monitoring & admin tasks are time burn

• Automation

Maintenance

• Want to keep cost low while maintaining performance

• Affected by other dimensions / factors

• Hardware

• Licences

• Contracts

• Vendor

Expenditure

UBS maintained linear-ish growth

Infrastructure

Software as a ServiceOn premise

Infrastructure options

SetupHarder / time / control

Support

Scale

Cloud

Harder / dependencies

Complex

Infra simple, app is yours

No infra, app is yours

Simple

Very easy & quick

Easy but vendor dependent

Very simple

Control Scalability

Tableau architecture

The UBS Tableau environment

UAT EngineeringDR TabJoltTabmonVizalerts

Production

128GB / 8 Core

Scaling the Tableau environment

Single node or small cluster – get what you can

Max out on RAM. Disk is cheap

Get value from your cores

Look for infrastructure optimisations

Starting

Keep an eye on extracts, RAM & CPU stats

Be aware of peak periods

What are users doing?

Growing

Wrong usage

Wrong expectationsBeware!

Upgrade schmupgrade?

CPU

Disk space

System load

Startup / restart times

Maintenance times

Data-driven alerts

Revision historySubscribe others

Monitoring is key to scaling

Get used to the built in admin-views

Postgres is your friend

Keep tabs on extracts & viz render times

Starting

Explore the logs

Leverage the monitoring utilities

Use the expert resourcesBonus!

Growing

Mark Kernke (Groupon - @markee88)

Jonathan MacDonald (The Information Lab -

@macdonaldj))

Tamas Foldi (Starschema - @tfoldi)

Matt Coles (Tableau)

Jen Savini (Disney)

Chris Toomey (Mapbox - @Sock1tToomey)

Craig Bloodworth (The Information Lab -@craigbloodworth)

Mark Wu (Apple)

Emma Whyte (The Information Lab - @emmawhyte)

Helpful utilities for monitoring Tableau

TabMon

Collects system and application health metrics (Perfmon, Java, JMX counters)

Monitor CPU, RAM, Network, disk, active sessions, latency, cache hits

Visualise results

Logshark

Interrogates Tableau Server log files

Extract issues and errors

Collect system metrics

Understand content usage

Visualise results

Logshark

Lumberjack

Lumberjack

Replayer

Reconstructs URL access and viz interactions using logs

Replay user experience, regression tests, measure performance

Visualise results

Replayer

Replayer

Service model & support

Choose an appropriate service model

User freedom & agility

Empowerment of users

Your team can concentrate on true IT service provision

Quality control is harder

Self-Serve

Lack of agility

Report factory, users don't see the benefit of Tableau

Better quality & governance

Governed

A good balance, but resource intensive for small teamsCombo

Scale your support - team

Cover the main locations

Cover the main functionality

Focus on talent recruitment

Starting

Monitor usage locations – update the support

Keep up with the R & D, betas

Build your Tableau football team

Growing

Key person dependenciesBeware!

Scale your support - efficiency

Prod incident

Other help

General chat

Automation is essential for scaling

Housekeeping & maintenance

Failover & failback, backups & restoresEssential

Server log file amalgamation

Postgres history storage

Upgrades & installs of Tableau (on premise)

Server builds & other software installs

Ideally

Powershell / bash

tabcmd, tabadmin

REST API, Document API, Javascript API

Community scripts – get help!

How?

Your wonderful users

Loads of windows

Overloading schedules

Full not incremental

Manual refreshes

Super-bad calcs

API madness

Not deleting junk

Housekeeping is the solution

Not accessed for > 100 days - toast

Old subscriptions - binned

Empty projects & AD groups - crushed

Long running extracts - stopped

Departed users - deleted

Training & community

Scaling up your users – improve data literacy

Create a community hub & training

Provide all the best practice documents

Set out the rules of engagement

Stay connected to stakeholders & track engagement

Starting

Identify your power users & champions

Push data literacy & demand excellenceGrowing

Cultural challengesBeware

41

Scalable learning - community

• 1083 members of Agile BI (as of Aug 2018)

• Top 10 position in members & views

• FAQs, Best Practices, user documentation & training materials

• Bi-weekly Service Update blogs

• Competitions, challenges, user blogs & polls

• Performance, capacity & usage visualisations

UBS Connections Community

• UBS Tableau Champions programme makes the most of our most engaged customers

• Proactive Tableau Touchpoints with a focus on user experience and feedback

• 8 module training syllabus & Tableau Dr. Sessions providing outstanding learning opportunities & support

• Vendor & community webinars & events

• External experts, conferences & events

User TrainingUser Empowerment

• Bi-monthly training syllabus

• Modules include

• Introduction to Tableau

• Data visualisation

• Calculations

• Parameters

• Multiple data sources

• Best practices & publishing

• Dashboarding & performance

• Tableau at UBS

Scalable learning - Tableau training syllabus

The training is very useful and I learn much quicker than just by exploring the tool myself

A big thank you for your training session. It gave a great understanding of the tool

I really appreciate the effort in conducting these training sessions – really useful!

Scalable learning - Tableau Doctor sessions

• One to one, user focused Tableau support sessions

• Any aspect of Tableau – Getting started, performance tuning, visual analytics

Tableau Dr. Live!

• Full day events hosted by UBS users & Tableau technicians

• Zurich May 2017

• Singapore June 2017 & April 2018

Tableau Dr. Digest!

Overview of the Agile BI Service (10 mins)

Scalable learning - Tableau executive training

Demo of Administration Views & introspection (10 mins)

Building a dashboard in Tableau Desktop (15 mins)

Q & A (15 mins)

Introduction to the Tableau Server (10 mins)

Scale up data literacy with a learning journey

Credit – Fiona Gordon, Commonwealth Bank of Australia

Data playbook

Credit – Fiona Gordon, Commonwealth Bank of Australia

Power user programme

Credit – Jowita Skweres, Jaguar Land Rover

Power user programme

Credit – Jowita Skweres, Jaguar Land Rover

Vendor expectations

Scale your vendor relationship

Start with standard support

Lay out YOUR expectationStarting

Consider extended or premium support

POCs – Strategic onboarding - training

Look for proactivity

Monitor, refine

Growing

Commercial challenges

Enthusiastic sales ☺

Demands on you

Beware

Understand your overall service capability

Please Sir…

Don’t be scared to ask for more!

Moneybucks, dough, bread, moolah, cheddar, paper, stash, Benjamin, Benji, loot,smackers, simoleons

bread, cabbage, clam, milk, dosh, dough, shillings, notes, loot, bar, coin, lolly, lucre, moolah, readies, spondoolies, wonga

Source: Wikipedia – Slang Terms for Money

Costs

Understand TCOStarting

Predict & forecast growth / spend

Understand the competing tools

Know the alternatives – Tableau Online, Cloud etc.

What are other companies doing?

Growing

The competition

The hitmen

The uninformed

Beware

What did we get wrong?

Regrets… we've had a few…

Onboarding wasn't great

Users had a little too much freedom

Training should have started at the beginning

Automation & housekeeping was neglected

Starting

Never got gamification going

Content quality always a challenge

Data literacy levels could be better

Growing

Tableau still the best self-service viz tool on the market

Vendor direction is critical

The Future

Partner with TableauBuild data literacyScale your team & model

Learn Tableau!Choose your platform wisely

Key takeaways

Understand scalability

Congrats – you're not that guy!

Thanks for listening – some recommended sessions..

@paulbanoub vizninja.com