11 August 2017
When we sign up for Tableau Online we get a choice of three locations to host our site at. We can be hosted on the west coast of America, the east coast of America or in Dublin, Ireland if we're in the EU. So how do we show which one we're connecting to?When we're visiting Tableau Online in our browser or vizzing with extracts we'll always hit Tableau's load balancer and the IPs from that can point to a variety of locations in Northern Europe and none of them are the safelisted ones in Tableau's documentation. What we need is a live connection where we can check the IP addresses of the requester.At The Information Lab we have a hosted Mircrosft SQL Server where we hold many of our larger demo data sets and this is one of Tableau's many supported live connections for Tableau Online. If we connect to this live data source through Tableau Online, it will send a request from one of Tableau's whitelisted IP addresses and we can use the SQL Server's system tables to see where the request came from.To do this with our Microsoft SQL Server we can use this custom SQL code to return the time of connection and the client's IP address.
Or in text form so you can copy & paste it:
This address looks familiar. It's one of Tableau's whitelisted IP addresses! And if we look it up using an IP locator, it does indeed tell us its in Dublin, Ireland.
Thanks for reading :)
Or in text form so you can copy & paste it:SELECT connect_time, client_net_addressFROM sys.dm_exec_connectionsWHERE session_id = @@SPID;This gives us a two fields with a row of data about our connection. When we connect from Desktop it will show our own location but once published to Online and viewed in browser then the request will come from Tableau itself.Here we can see the connection time and the requesting IP address to the SQL Server.This address looks familiar. It's one of Tableau's whitelisted IP addresses! And if we look it up using an IP locator, it does indeed tell us its in Dublin, Ireland.Thanks for reading :)