If you open the bonnet and take a look at what's happening beneath the surface of Tableau server, you'd be able to find data about all the data sources, extracts, user interactions, storage and more in a PostgreSQL database within the Tableau server repository. Once you have access to the repository you can start using this data to understand the performance of Tableau server.

In order to connect to your specific companies PostgreSQL database, do as follows:

• Open up your version of Tableau and in the 'Connect to data' pane under 'To a server' select 'PostgreSQL'

• Now enter your Tableau credentials which include the server name, port, database, and username and password

• Click sign in and you can start investigating!

Once you have established this connection, Tableau will automatically populate the Tables section of the Data Source tab with the tables available inside Tableau Server. If you want to understand the data and what information it contains, check out this detailed log which provides a data dictionary of all the tables, and how they link together.

I decided to take a look at the total amount of data on our server, and how much space it was taking up - have a look below!

This dashboard broke down the files on the server into data sources, workflows and workbooks.