0:00Hey, it's Tim here and 23.2 Tableau have
0:02added additional capabilities to manage
0:05personal access tokens. To find out what
0:08they are and to see what those options are,
0:10let's get stuck in.
0:11Okay, so you're probably wondering, hey,
0:13what are personal access tokens? Well, if
0:15you don't know what they are, Tableau
0:16actually describes them to you here in the
0:18general tab. If you scroll down to the
0:20personal access token sections, it actually
0:22gives you a description, but I'll do it in
0:24plain English as well.
0:25They're just essentially long lived
0:27authentication tokens that allow users to
0:29sign into the Tableau REST API without
0:32requiring hard coded credentials, ie
0:34username and password. So instead of a
0:36username and password, you essentially get
0:39given a token.
0:40So a token is something like, let's say I
0:42create a token called test, that token
0:44would have a name called test, it would
0:47then have a key and it would also have a
0:49secret essentially. And so what that allows
0:52you to do is essentially use that instead
0:54of a user name,
0:54and password. And the idea is that really
0:56only you in the application should know
0:58that information, and therefore nothing
1:00else should really know those pieces of
1:03information. And they're also sort of quite
1:05obscure. In fact, what we can do is we can
1:08let me go ahead and show you how to create
1:10a personal access token.
1:12If you go to your account settings and you
1:14scroll down, you can see here's the
1:16personal access token interface. So we can
1:18go ahead and create a personal access token
1:20called the test, create a token, and you'll
1:23see that this one gets an expiration date
1:25of August the 12th.
1:27This is the name of the token, this is the
1:28secret, and you can copy this secret. And
1:30because you're all seeing this, this means
1:32I'm going to delete this straight away.
1:35But nonetheless, you could then use this to
1:37do something on my Tableau Cloud instance
1:40with this particular login. So because you
1:42've all seen it, I'm going to go ahead and
1:43revoke the token straight away. And there
1:45you go, it's completely gone.
1:47So that's how you create them and that's
1:48how you use them. Now, up until recently,
1:51people have been able to create this, but
1:52there hasn't been a way for admins to
1:54really manage how they work.
1:56So what we can go ahead and do is we go to
1:58the Settings tab here, go down to General,
2:00you can see here it's at the top, and then
2:02scroll down to the personal access token
2:05section.
2:06You have to keep scrolling because Tableau
2:07keeps adding stuff to this and they don't
2:09give you a quick way to go and find the
2:10specific thing you're actually interested
2:12in. There we go, we finally got there,
2:15managed to fill the space with some chat.
2:17So here we are, personal access tokens. Now
2:19you have these options. So you can enable
2:21personal access tokens on the site. So you
2:23can go ahead and disable them so people can
2:25actually create them, which is quite good,
2:27actually, it's important to be able to do
2:29that because
2:30people are given these applications, you
2:32kind of want to make sure that you have
2:34some sort of oversight of that. The other
2:36thing is you can say look, all users on the
2:38site can do this, or you could make certain
2:41users in a specific group have this ability
2:44.
2:44So you could, for example, go and get users
2:45from your test group to have this
2:47capability. And so they'll be the only ones
2:49able to create those personal access tokens
2:51. The second thing is you can set an
2:53expiration period.
2:54So if you have an enterprise wide,
2:55expiration or password cycle management,
2:58you know, set up, you can go ahead and set
3:00it to 180 days, which is the default, or in
3:02some organizations, they might have a
3:04specific number, let's say 120.
3:07You can go ahead and just type that in, let
3:09me just do that now. And once we've done
3:11all that, you can go ahead and hit save.
3:14And that immediately means that those have
3:16been changed. Now, the weird thing is what
3:19I would still like to be able to do is to
3:21get some oversight of all these personal
3:23access tokens.
3:24I'm not sure if that's something that's
3:25coming in the future. But I do think it
3:27would be really, really nice just to see
3:29all the personal access tokens that have
3:31been created somewhere in this interface. I
3:33'm sure Tableau has already thought about
3:34this.
3:35But that would be sort of the next step,
3:36sort of an ability to audit these and see
3:38when they're being used to how frequently
3:40they're being used, and potentially even
3:42what applications and what activities are
3:44being run from them.
3:46I know that you can already get some of
3:48this with specific data from Postgres or
3:50specific data from the auditing
3:52capabilities of Tableau. But again, just
3:54making this more visible and more readily
3:56available, I think will be a great step
3:58forward.
3:59If you know more about these and I've
4:00missed something, let me know in the
4:02comments below. I'm always very conscious
4:04that this is not a topic area that I'm
4:06super confident in.
4:08So if you know something that I've missed
4:10that should be in this video, let me know
4:12in the comments and I'll go ahead and I'll
4:14mark it as pinned on this video so other
4:16people can see your comment.
4:18Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in
4:19the next one.
4:20[BLANK_AUDIO]
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