Google Apps Login for your Tableau Server

Logins, UserIds, Passwords, and lots of them: the story of my life as a consultant. If your organization uses Google Apps for single sign-on, wouldn't it be great to use this Google login to sign in to Tableau Server as well?

This post will show you how to enable OpenID on Tableau Server so you can login using via Google Single Sign-On (SSO).

For using OpenID, verify that your Tableau Server meets following specification:

Using local authentication (not Active Directory)
Tableau Server version 9.2 or higher

Step 1: Create a Google Developer Console project

Click this link and create a new project:

Step 2: Within the Console project, add new API credentials

Select OAuth Client ID.

Choose the web application type.

Step 3: Specify the ClientID credentials

Name the web client.

For Authorized Redirect URI, replace the existing text with the external address for your Tableau Server, followed by "auth/add_oauth_token".

https://your_server_url.com/auth/add_oauth_token

After that, hit the Create button and a window pops up with your OAuth ClientID and Client secret. Both of them are needed to configure the Tableau Server. Copy these some place (such as a Notepad document).

Step4: Enable APIs

Before we can configure the Tableau server, we must enable following APIs in your developers console:

Big Query API
- A data platform for customers to create, manage, share and query data
Analytics API
- The Analytics API provides access to Analytics configuration and report data

This concludes the configuration of the OAuth client. The next step is to configure the Tableau Server to use this OpenID.

Step 5: Configure Tableau Server

You'll need the following information that we gathered in the previous steps:

Client ID
Client secret

Other information:

Tableau Server external URL
Provider configuation URL
- for Google, this is https://accounts.google.com/.well-known/openid-configuration

Stop Tableau Server
Open Tableau Server Configuration
Select the OpenID tab
Configure OpenID as shown in the image below
Copy the redirect URL to clipboard
Click OK
Start Tableau Server

Step6: Modify your ClientID Credentials

Go back to the Developers Console to edit the ClientID credentials.

Paste the Tableau Server redirect URL into the Authorized redirect URIs

Hit the Save button.

Step 7: Test setup

To test the setup, make sure your Tableau Server contains the named users. NOTE: The user ids in the Tableau Server must be the Google Apps email addresses.