Once you know the critical KPIs you’d like to build in Pulse, the next step is to locate where the supporting data resides.
It's important to determine if these data sources are published (required), certified, and if they require any transformation. We recommend using the Data Source Manager for Tableau Cloud Accelerator ahead of creating any Pulse metrics to better explore, improve, and validate the data sources you have in Tableau, so that you can more comfortably scale self-service and AI-driven solutions to your users.
The best Pulse use cases involve tracking a metric’s current value compared to the past (ex, “How do we compare YoY from a year ago…”) or future (“Are we trending towards hitting our quota?...”). Work with your data teams to identify any gaps in your available data and define the data requirements for your Pulse use case. As such, keep in mind the data best practices for Pulse:
- Outline how data will move from sources to Tableau Pulse, ensuring seamless integration
between systems
- Optimize joins in the physical data source
- Data is current and changes regularly
- Implement data cleaning, validation, and enrichment processes to ensure the data is accurate, consistent, and reliable for use in Tableau Pulse
- Data is granular, without pre-aggregations
- Pre-build computations in the physical data source
- Data contains key dimensions and clean, contextual, and human-readable field names (as
these will be visible in Pulse)
- Hide or isolate unneeded attributes
- Assign clear business names to attributes
- Use title-style capitalization rather than all caps
- Use spaces rather than hyphens or underscores to separate words
- Don’t use special characters
- Don’t use Boolean fields that appear as true or false
- Don’t use dimensions that consist of indecipherable strings (e.g. IDs)
Finally, identify if the data is available as a live connection or if it's an extract. If it's an extract, ensure the data refresh schedule aligns with the frequency of your reporting needs to maintain up-to-date insights.
Use this Pulse Metric Project Plan Template to help document and plan out the necessary components of building out data requirements and Pulse metrics.