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Terence Soh edited this page Oct 26, 2016 · 5 revisions

Welcome to the Tableau Log Viewer wiki!

Here, you can learn about the features of Tableau Log Viewer (or TLV for short)

Where does Tableau save the logs?

Tableau Desktop stores the logs in the "Logs" subfolder under "My Tableau Repository". Examples:

  • On Windows: C:\Users<user>\Documents\My Tableau Repository\Logs\
  • On Mac: Example: ~/Documents/My Tableau Repository/Logs

Tableau Server stores the logs under:

  • On Windows: C:\ProgramData\Tableau\Tableau Server\data\tabsvc\logs\

What is the "(beta) log"?

When using a pre-release or beta version of Tableau, it will use a different folder to store Workbooks, Data sources and Logs. It appears under Documents as "My Tableau Repository (beta)". When TLV refers to the "Beta logs" it refers to the logs in this folder.

Features

Cross platform

Tableau Log Viewer is built using Qt. The application works on both Windows and Mac OS X.

Cross platform

Live Capture

Monitor the events happening in Tableau as they happen. There are different options to start a live capture:

  • Toggle Live Capture on the current file
  • Enable Live Capture on an entire folder
  • Shortcuts to enable live capture on common files and directories under "My Tableau Repository"
  • Drag and drop one or more directories into TLV to start monitoring all text files

Recent files

Keeps track of recently opened files, and allows you to clear the history list.

Find

Search and find events by looking at their keys, values, session, etc. Use F3 and Shift+F3 to go through all the found events quickly.

Highlight filters

Highlight events that have certain characteristics. The colors default to a predefined palette, but they can be overridden. TLV can have many highlight filters. Newer filters (further right) have a higher priority.

Highlight filters

Highlight only mode

Only keep the events that are highlighted and filter out the rest. Available in Menu->Highlight->Highlight only mode; or by pressing Ctrl+J (Windows) or Cmd+J (Mac).

Save and load filters

Save a set of highlight filters so you can restore them later in another session of Tableau Log Viewer. These options are available under the Highlight menu.

Default hightlight filter

Automatically load a given hightlight filter on new windows and tabs of Tableau Log Viewer. This option is available under Menu->Help->Options.

SQL Syntax Highlighter

When opening events with queries, TLV will highlight the SQL queries to make them easier to read.

SQL Highlighter

Query Visualization

See queries in a tree visualization. Query visualizations are available for the following events:

  • All logical-query events
  • All logical-query-rewrite events
  • For begin-query and end-query events that issue query function trees (like the ones generated when connected to Tableau Server).

To launch a query visualization, open one of those events and you will notice that the "Visualize query" button is enabled. When you press it, the visualizer will open:

SQL Highlighter

To see logical-query events in the logs, you need to launch Tableau with the following Tableau parameter: -DLogDetail=LogicalQueryXML

On Windows do:

tableau.exe -DLogDetail=LogicalQueryXML

On Mac, you will need to launch Tableau like this:

open -a Tableau.app --args -DLogDetail=LogicalQueryXML