How do I use Athena drivers to troubleshoot Tableau connectivity?

Resolution

Resolve driver-related issues

If you experience driver-related issues, then you receive an error message that's similar to the following one:

"The drivers required to connect to the data source are not installed. No Suitable driver Installed. Error code: AA76601F"

This error occurs when you don't use a suitable Athena JDBC driver, or download it to the correct location.

To resolve this issue, complete the following steps:

1. Download the latest version of Athena JDBC driver JAR with a bundled AWS SDK.
2. Save the Athena JDBC driver in the correct Tableau driver location:
   For Windows, save the Athena JDBC .jar file in the C:\Program Files\Tableau\Drivers folder.
   For macOS, save the Athena JDBC .jar file in the ~/Library/Tableau/Drivers folder.
   Note: Don't add multiple .jar files. If you add multiple .jar files, then driver-related issues might occur.
3. Restart Tableau, and then connect to Athena.

Resolve connection timeouts

If you experience connection timeouts, then you receive an error message that's similar to the following one:

"com/amazonaws/ClientConfiguration Unable to connect to the Amazon Athena server athena.us-east-1.amazonaws.com. Check that the server is running and that you have access privileges to the requested database."

This error occurs when there's no connection between the driver that's on the installed host and Athena.

Note: In the following commands, replace aa-example-1 with your AWS Region. For the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) endpoint commands, replace 1234567890abcdef0 with your VPC endpoint ID.

To resolve this issue, take the following actions:

• Open ports 443 and 444. Athena uses port 443 to connect to the host, and the Athena streaming API uses port 444 to stream query results.

• Run the following commands for your operating system (OS) to test endpoint connectivity to ports 443 and 444 from the driver's host machine:
  Windows:

  telnet athena.aa-example-1.amazonaws.com 443
  
  telnet athena.aa-example-1.amazonaws.com 444

  macOS:

  nc -v athena.aa-example-1.amazonaws.com 443
  
  nc -v athena.aa-example-1.amazonaws.com 444

  If you use an Amazon VPC endpoint for a private DNS server, then add your VPC endpoint ID to the beginning of the endpoint. Then, add the vpce subdomain.
  VPC endpoint on Windows:

  telnet vpce-1234567890abcdef0.athena.aa-example-1.vpce.amazonaws.com 443
  
  telnet vpce-1234567890abcdef0.athena.aa-example-1.vpce.amazonaws.com 444

  VPC endpoint on macOS:

  nc -v vpce-1234567890abcdef0.athena.aa-example-1.vpce.amazonaws.com 443
  
  nc -v vpce-1234567890abcdef0.athena.aa-example-1.vpce.amazonaws.com 444

• Use the correct AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user access key ID and secret access key. Also, add the required permissions for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Athena, and AWS Glue.

Debug query and connection-related issues

To turn on Athena JDBC driver logs for Tableau, complete the following steps:

1. Create an athena.properties file in the following Datasources folder for your OS:
   For Windows, use the C:\Users\[YourUsername]\Documents\My Tableau Repository\Datasources folder.
   For macOS, use the ~/Documents/My Tableau Repository/Datasources folder.

2. Open the properties file, and then add the following:

   LogLevel=6
   LogPath=D:\test\
   UseAwsLogger=1

3. Save the file, and then close Tableau.

4. Connect to Athena.

The AthenaJDBC_connection and AthenaJDBC_Driver log files now generate in the Datasources folder.