Tableau Server & Cloud Setup

How Rapid BI Catalog connects to Tableau — environments, sites, authentication, and service accounts.

Tableau ServerTableau CloudTableau Connected AppsAdmin only

Rapid BI Catalog connects directly to Tableau to download workbooks and generate documentation, lineage, and metadata. This page explains how that connection is structured so an administrator can set it up correctly. All Tableau configuration is performed by an Admin in the web UI under BI Server Configuration.

Licence Required
Tableau connectivity requires the Tableau connector licence feature. If your licence does not include it, the BI Server Configuration page is not available.

How it works

Rapid BI Catalog uses Tableau Connected Apps for authentication:

  • Environment — a single Tableau Server or a single Tableau Cloud tenant. You add one environment per Server/tenant.
  • Sites — each environment contains one or more Tableau sites that you configure for processing.
  • Authentication — each site authenticates end users with one of two Tableau Connected App methods, Direct Trust or OAuth 2.0 Trust.
  • Service Account — scheduled jobs authenticate with a dedicated Service Account (a Tableau Personal Access Token), not an end‑user identity.
  • User Discovery — an admin runs User Discovery to list users.

Environments — Server vs Cloud

An environment is either a Tableau Server (identified by its server URL) or a Tableau Cloud tenant (discovered from a Tableau Cloud Manager admin token).

Each Tableau Cloud tenant is configured independently
Two Tableau Cloud tenants can share the same pod URL (for example 10ax.online.tableau.com). Even so, each tenant must be added as its own environment — Rapid BI Catalog distinguishes Cloud environments by tenant, and Server environments by URL.

Only HTTPS Tableau URLs are accepted, for security reasons.

Prerequisites

  • An Admin PAT per environment, used for discovery (listing sites and users): for Tableau Cloud this is a Tableau Cloud Manager (TCM) Personal Access Token; for Tableau Server it is a server administrator PAT. (This is separate from the Service Account used for scheduled downloads.)
  • For Tableau Cloud, the Rapid BI Catalog server must be able to reach cloudmanager.tableau.com(see the Egress Allowlist).
  • Users must be explicit members of each Tableau site. Implicit access (for example a server/site administrator who is not an explicit site member) is not detected, and such users will not be able to process content from that site.
  • End users must allow pop‑ups for the one‑time sign‑in window used by OAuth 2.0 Trust.

Choosing an authentication method

Each site uses either Connected Apps with Direct Trust or Connected Apps with OAuth 2.0 Trust. See Tableau Connected Apps for a full comparison and how to choose. Scheduling additionally requires a Service Account, and Direct Trust sites require User Discovery to be run first.

Next Steps