Angry users 🤯 Tableau Server ran out of disk space

3 min readJun 23, 2022

If you’re reading this post, you’ve probably been there, done that 😵 : Your beautiful Tableau Server had been running like a Ferrari for months, but sudenly this morning you’ve got loads of angry users complaining the can’t get their morning fix of KPIs.

I typically deal with clients on large global deployments that include Tableau embedded analytics into their apps. When they end up running out of disk space, it means they start to see massive user churn.

It takes ages to acquire a client and have them truly adopt the product, but such a “silly” lack of hygiene can cause a hurricane of churn in seconds.

Don’t be fooled: Tableau does has a well documented suggestions for monitoring and implementing these hygiene strategies, so let’s do it!

Removing Unneeded Files

I’m going to focus here on the most common offender: Log Files and older installations.

Older installations

After upgrading the server, you will be left with 15GB or more space lost with the previous version. After you’re confortable with the new one, do make sure to uninstall the older ones!

Log Files

Ahead of anything, optionally archive the logs you may want to keep, as this may be useful if in the future you wish to go back and audit e.g. the adoption or hardware metrics of your enviornment.

Note: if the impacted Server is completely stuck, you might need to restart it first and wait until at least its own tsm has been started properly. This can take some time, but it’s better to wait than to reinstall eveything from scratch.

So let’s say you can’t even remote-access your server (e.g. RDP or SSH) to clean it? Not to worry! You can fix it remotelly:

If you don’t have one already, install Tableau Server on a test environment. Any recent version will do, we don’t care, we really just want to have access to a functioning Tableau Services Manager command line tool instance (aka TSM) . I recommend you always have such environment availble, you could even do it from a Tableau Container.

2. Now you can remotely access the impacted Tableau Server:

tsm login -s <server> -u <user> -p <password> --trust-admin-controller-cert

where <server> = https://<server-ip>:8850 and <user> is your tableau server machine OS admin user (not the Tableau Server admin user!!)

3. Stop the server if running

To ensure it will clear up as much as possible, try to stop the server if it’s running:

tsm stop

4. Now you can clean all logs:

tsm maintenance cleanup --all -s <server> -u <user> --trust-admin-controller-cert

That’s it, now you should be good to go again.

Just make sure to implement such Server hygiene on a automated script fashion, so you don’t end up in this embarassing situation.

If you are curious how much space this can save, as an example on my test machine I went from 330mb free space to a whooping 90gb just by clearing the logs. Here’s how it looked before: