Services—Managed BI

Managed BI Services

Your analytics environment needs engineering attention — but hiring a senior BI engineer full-time is expensive, slow, and creates key-person risk. Our managed service gives you dedicated, senior-level BI engineering capacity on a monthly retainer. We monitor, maintain, and continuously improve your analytics stack — with a 4-hour SLA for critical issues and a proactive stance that catches problems before they reach your users. Most clients save 25–35% versus the fully loaded cost of an equivalent full-time hire.

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Managed BI services
24/7
Environment monitoring
4hr
Critical response SLA
99.9%
Uptime target
30%
Avg. cost vs. FTE hire

What's Included

Capabilities

01

Proactive Environment Monitoring

Continuous monitoring of your BI infrastructure — Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud health, extract refresh schedules and failures, backgrounder process utilisation, VizQL server load, licensing consumption, and security configuration drift. We alert on anomalies before they become outages. For Tableau Server, we use the Resource Monitoring Tool where licensed; for all environments, we build custom monitoring against the Tableau REST API and server log exports. The goal is that your users never experience a failure you did not already know about.

02

Scheduled Maintenance & Version Management

Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud require regular maintenance to stay secure, performant, and compatible. We handle version upgrades — assessing release notes, testing against your environment in a dev instance, and executing production upgrades during off-peak windows. We manage patch applications, driver updates, and connector maintenance. We audit and rotate service account credentials. And we proactively flag upcoming EOL milestones — like the Tableau Server end-of-life transition — with enough lead time to plan a managed response rather than a reactive one.

03

Performance Management

BI environments degrade over time without active performance management. Extract sizes grow. Workbooks accumulate complexity. Publishing governance loosens. Server resources become constrained. We manage performance continuously: reviewing extract architecture and scheduling, identifying the highest-load workbooks and optimising their data models, tuning backgrounder and VizQL process configurations, and flagging workbooks that are approaching performance thresholds before users start complaining. Performance issues addressed proactively cost a fraction of performance emergencies investigated reactively.

04

User, Access & Licensing Management

Tableau environments in growing organisations quickly develop user management debt: former employees still with active licences, permissions granted beyond the minimum required, group structures that no longer reflect current teams, and licensing utilisation that is either over-provisioned (waste) or under-provisioned (constraint). We conduct quarterly access reviews, manage onboarding and offboarding workflows, optimise licensing utilisation to match actual usage patterns, and maintain documented permission structures that satisfy audit requirements. For organisations with HIPAA, SOC 2, or financial regulatory requirements, access governance is not optional — it is a compliance obligation.

05

Ongoing Content Development

Most managed services deliver infrastructure management but leave development backlog to pile up. Ours includes a development capacity allocation — a defined number of development days per month against a prioritised backlog of new dashboard requirements, existing workbook improvements, and new data source connections. Requirements are scoped, estimated, and delivered on a sprint cadence. New content meets the same engineering standards as the rest of your certified content — governed data sources, standardised design, published documentation. No shadow IT, no undocumented workbooks published by individual analysts bypassing governance.

06

Monthly Strategic Review

Once a month, we review your BI environment with the relevant stakeholder — your data team lead, CTO, or VP of Analytics. We present: environment health and usage trends, the most impactful performance observations, upcoming risks (licensing thresholds, server capacity, EOL milestones), the development work completed in the last 30 days, and our recommended priorities for the next 30. The review keeps the managed service aligned with your business priorities, not just your infrastructure requirements. It is also where we surface architectural observations — patterns in how your environment is being used that suggest broader platform investment might be warranted.

When You Need Us

Use Cases

01/
You have a Tableau Server or Cloud environment with no dedicated internal resource to manage it
This is the most common scenario we are engaged for. A Tableau environment without dedicated engineering attention degrades over time — extract schedules drift, workbooks accumulate complexity, server configuration falls behind, governance loosens. The symptoms look like a Tableau problem; the root cause is a resourcing problem. We become your BI engineering team on retainer — monitoring, maintaining, and developing the environment to the standard a senior Tableau engineer would maintain internally, at a cost that is typically 25–35% lower than the fully loaded cost of that hire.
02/
Your BI team is stretched and the development backlog is growing
Internal BI teams at growing organisations consistently face the same constraint: the combination of BAU maintenance, incident response, user requests, and new development requirements exceeds the team's capacity. The development backlog grows. High-priority requests wait. The team works evenings and weekends. We operate as a capacity extension — handling the maintenance and BAU workload that consumes the most engineering hours, freeing your internal team to focus on the strategic development work that actually moves the analytics function forward.
03/
A key-person departure has left your BI environment without institutional knowledge
When the person who built and maintained your Tableau environment leaves, they take the undocumented knowledge of how it works with them. Why extracts are scheduled the way they are. Which data sources are connected to what. Why certain calculations are designed the way they are. We stabilise the environment, conduct a systematic audit using the Tableau REST API and Metadata API to document what exists, and establish proper operational procedures so the environment is maintainable by any qualified engineer — not just the original builder.
04/
You are navigating the Tableau Server end-of-life transition and need managed support through it
The Tableau Server end-of-life announcement requires organisations to make a decision: migrate to Tableau Cloud, move to extended support, or evaluate alternatives. That decision, and the execution that follows, is a multi-month programme that requires sustained engineering attention. We manage the transition from assessment through migration through stabilisation — maintaining your existing Server environment while planning and executing the migration to whatever the right target state is for your organisation.

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FAQ

Common Questions

How much do managed BI services cost?

Our managed BI service retainers are structured around the scope of the environment and the level of service required. For a single Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud environment with monitoring, maintenance, user management, and a modest development allocation, retainers typically start at $5,500–$8,000 per month. Larger environments with higher development capacity allocation, multiple environments (production, development, DR), or complex governance requirements run $10,000–$20,000 per month. All retainers include the 4-hour critical response SLA and monthly strategic review. Fixed-scope retainers available after a one-week environment assessment.

What is the minimum commitment period?

We structure managed services as 12-month engagements with a 90-day initial period that includes the onboarding assessment and environment handover. The 12-month structure allows us to invest in understanding your environment deeply enough to manage it proactively rather than reactively. For organisations in active transition — like a Tableau Server to Cloud migration — we offer transition-scoped engagements that cover the duration of the project plus a stabilisation period. We do not offer month-to-month retainers for core managed services; the onboarding investment does not make economic sense for either party at that term.

Do you manage Tableau Cloud as well as Tableau Server?

Yes. Our managed service covers both Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud — and the migration between the two. For Tableau Cloud, the management scope shifts from infrastructure and server administration (which Salesforce/Tableau handles) to environment governance: site configuration, publishing governance, certified content management, user and group management, extract optimisation, and performance monitoring via the Tableau REST API. For organisations in mid-migration — running both a Server and a Cloud environment simultaneously — we manage both environments and coordinate the transition.

We already have an internal BI team. How does your managed service work alongside them?

The most common model is co-managed: your internal team handles strategic development and stakeholder relationships; we handle infrastructure management, BAU requests, and the work that consumes engineering time without requiring strategic judgment. We operate against a shared ticketing system, participate in sprint planning for the development backlog, and hand off documentation so your team maintains full visibility into what we are doing and why. We do not operate as a black box. The goal is that if we step back from the engagement, your internal team can continue seamlessly.

What is covered under the 4-hour critical response SLA?

Critical incidents under the SLA are: Tableau Server or Cloud completely unavailable to all users; authentication failure preventing all users from logging in; data corruption or loss in a certified data source; security incident or unauthorised access. For critical incidents, our on-call engineer begins diagnosis within 4 hours of notification, provides an initial assessment within that window, and works continuously until resolution. Non-critical incidents (slow dashboards, individual extract failures, access issues for specific users) are addressed within the standard service window — typically next business day, with same-day response for high-priority non-critical issues.

How do you handle the transition from our current provider or internal team?

The onboarding process starts with a two-week environment assessment — using the Tableau REST API, Metadata API, and log analysis to catalogue every workbook, data source, extract, schedule, user, and permission in your environment. We document the current state, identify the gaps in existing documentation, flag risks and issues requiring immediate attention, and establish baseline monitoring. By the end of the assessment, we have enough environment knowledge to manage it proactively. The transition from a previous provider or internal team is designed to be invisible to your end users — no service disruption, no loss of access during handover.

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