5 Replies Latest reply on Aug 4, 2016 7:58 AM by Aaron Girard

    VizAlerts no longer working.

    Aaron Girard

      Hello all,


      I installed vizalerts on my tableau server about a month ago and its been working really well. Just now as I want to put it into production it stops working though. I can't figure out the cause and I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts. Here is my problem:


      I have these two views:

      simple alert.PNG

      advanced view.PNG


      When I set them up on the below subscription, I'm expecting to get alerts every 15 minutes.



      However, I'm not getting any alerts. I have used the same subscriptions in the past successfully to get VizAlerts. I first tried to manually run vizalerts.py and got this:

      command prompt.PNG

      I let these subscriptions run overnight and in the log file it shows the same, that the script checked every minute but never actually triggered the alert. What I can't figure out is that it looks like vizalerts is correctly realizing that there are two visuals on disabled subscriptions (I added another vis to a non-disabled subscription and the script correctly only returned 2 rows) but for some reason isn't triggering even though the views aren't empty. Moreover, I got 3 emails about Out of memory errors (I also saw them in the log), so I know that the email functionality is working.


      Does anyone have any thoughts on this?


      Any help is much appreciated,



      P.S. To debug I've been trying to publish the VizAlertsDemo,twb workbook to my server but keep getting this error but I can't find any information about it online. The weird thing is that I was previously able to publish it, but had deleted it. This could be a completely different issue but I thought I'd mention in case it wasn't or if anyone knew what it meant.


      8003 error.PNG

        • 1. Re: VizAlerts no longer working.
          Matt Coles

          Sorry to hear you're having this problem! Hmmm...interesting. You're right, it's seeing the subscriptions in the database, but if you see it never actually requesting the CSV data in the logs, it doesn't seem to realize when it's time to test the alerts for data.


          My first guess is that the schedule settings are preventing them from ever looking like it's time to run the Schedule, from Tableau Server's perspective. The From/To settings are always difficult to understand for me, and I've had the same issue when setting them up. Here is what mine looks like for the 15-minute schedule:



          Since yours are set to 12am to 12am, it's a nonexistant window of time. Try setting the end time to 11:45pm and see if that works.


          If it doesn't, we'll want to look at ops\vizalerts.state -- that's where VizAlerts stores the "next run time" at for each subscription so that it can tell when it needs to test the alerts for data again.


          Let me know if that works!

          1 of 1 people found this helpful
          • 2. Re: VizAlerts no longer working.
            Aaron Girard

            Hi Matt Coles,

                 Thanks for getting back to me. I switched my schedule from 12am to 11:45pm. The weird thing is that it worked once. It wouldn't trigger again even after waiting an hour. I tried unsubscribing and resubscribing. I also tried to create a second alert schedule from 4pm to 6pm. Nothing is working. Here is the current content of my vizalerts.state. It hasn't changed since I set up the subscriptions yesterday. One peculiar thing is that the second subscription is on a schedule from 4pm-6pm. I set up the alert at 4 30pm, why would it be scheduled for 8pm (second row)?


            Dev-Test221158None2016-08-03 17:30:002016-08-03 17:45:0057
            Dev-Test231159None2016-08-03 20:30:002016-08-03 20:45:0059



            Thanks in advance,


            • 3. Re: VizAlerts no longer working.
              Matt Coles

              Very odd! Okay, here are some additional things to check:


              1. Double check all your vizalerts.conf settings. Did you make sure to point the PostGreSQL bit to the new production server? Are there any filters in the query at the bottom that need adjusting?

              2. Is the Windows Task running consistently in Production? Check the history in Task Scheduler to be sure it's running and not throwing an error.

              3. If both of those things are fine, please do the following

              1. Stop and disable the Windows Task
              2. Remove the Schedule from the task
              3. Run the task manually once and note the time
              4. Copy the log file, the state file, and your config file for the heck of it to a separate folder
              5. Wait until the next 15 minute mark passes in the hour, then run the task one more time (say, at 8:16 or 8:31 or somesuch)
              6. Copy the log file and the state file to a separate folder, with new names to distinguish them from the previous copies
              7. Redact the files as necessary and post them here (or you can email them to me, my [first initial].[last name]at[mycompany].com
              • 4. Re: VizAlerts no longer working.
                Toby Erkson

                Aaron Girard wrote:


                Hello all,



                You had it installed on a test/qa server that is running successfully and now you are wanting it on a different, production server, correct?

                • 5. Re: VizAlerts no longer working.
                  Aaron Girard

                  I restarted the server and it seems to be working now.... I don't know why I didn't think of this before (should have been my first move). They way that works sometimes.


                  Thanks so much for responding so timely, I really appreciate it =D