Monday morning, the attendance dashboard is blank. Excel says it can’t refresh, Power BI throws an authentication error, or Tableau reports that it failed to connect to the OData source. Nobody changed the query. So what broke?
An Altru OData feed runs through several layers you don’t control: Blackbaud’s hosted environment, your sign-in, the network between you and Blackbaud, and the tool reading the feed. When a feed stops, the cause usually sits in one of those layers rather than in the query itself. The trick is figuring out which one, quickly, so you know whether to wait, re-authenticate, or rebuild the connection.
Start by narrowing down where it fails
Before you change anything, run two small tests. They’ll save you an hour of guessing.
- Can you run the query inside Altru? If the query itself errors out, times out, or returns nothing in Altru, the feed was never the problem. Fix the query first.
- Does the feed URL open in a browser? Paste the OData URL into a browser and sign in when prompted. If you get data back (it will look like raw XML or JSON), the feed works and the problem is in the tool consuming it. If the browser also fails, the problem is upstream: Altru, Blackbaud’s service, or your credentials.
Also try the same feed from a second tool if you have one. If Excel can refresh it but Tableau can’t, you’ve learned a lot without opening a support ticket.
The usual causes, roughly in order of likelihood
1. A Blackbaud service issue or maintenance window
Altru is hosted, and OData endpoints can be affected by outages or scheduled maintenance even when the main Altru interface seems fine. Check Blackbaud’s system status page and any maintenance notices before troubleshooting on your end. If several people at other organizations are reporting the same thing on the same day, it’s almost certainly this, and the fix is patience.
2. Credentials and sign-in changes
OData connections store a username and password (or a cached sign-in) inside the reporting tool. Anything that changes how that sign-in works can quietly break a feed that ran for years:
- The account’s password was changed or expired.
- Multi-factor authentication or a new sign-in method was turned on for the account.
- The person whose credentials were saved in the connection left, or their Altru user was disabled.
- Their Altru role changed and they no longer have rights to the query or the data it touches.
A common pattern: the feed was built under one staff member’s personal login, and it fails the week that person’s access changes. If you can, run shared reporting feeds under a dedicated account your team controls, and document who owns it.
3. A Windows, Office, or browser update
Updates on the client side sometimes change how saved credentials, older authentication methods, or security protocols are handled. When a feed breaks right after a round of Microsoft updates on a single machine, test the same feed on a machine that hasn’t updated yet, or from a browser. If it works elsewhere, the update is the likely cause. Clearing the saved credentials in Excel or Power BI and signing in again is a reasonable first step. If that doesn’t help, your IT team or Microsoft support is the right next stop. We’d rather tell you that plainly than guess at a specific patch.
4. Tableau’s connector or extract settings
Tableau connects to OData through its own connector, and its behavior can change between Tableau versions. Things worth checking:
- Whether the failure happens in Tableau Desktop, on Tableau Server/Cloud, or both. A failure only on the server often means the server can’t reach the endpoint or doesn’t have the saved credentials.
- Whether embedded credentials on a published data source were removed or expired.
- Whether you recently upgraded Tableau. If so, check Tableau’s release notes and knowledge base for OData connector changes.
- Whether a scheduled extract refresh is timing out because the query has grown.
5. The query outgrew the feed
A query that returned 5,000 rows when you built it may return far more three seasons later. Large result sets can time out over OData even though they run inside Altru. Add date filters (for example, rolling 13 months instead of all time), drop output fields you no longer use, and split very wide queries into two.
6. Someone edited the query
Renaming, removing, or reordering output fields can break a downstream report that expects specific columns, even though the feed itself still loads. Compare the query’s current output fields with what the report expects, and ask anyone with edit rights whether they changed it. Consider locking down edit rights on queries that feed dashboards.
When to call Blackbaud support
If the browser test fails, the status page shows nothing, and your credentials work for logging into Altru normally, open a case with Blackbaud. Give them the exact error text, the time it started, the query name, and whether the browser test failed too. That information gets you past the first round of questions.
Making the next outage less painful
- Keep a short list of every report and dashboard that depends on an OData feed, with the account it uses.
- Set up a simple check: someone opens the key dashboard every Monday and confirms the last refresh date.
- Keep a recent CSV export of your most important queries so leadership isn’t left empty-handed while a feed is down.
Quick answers
Is Altru OData being discontinued?
We can’t speak for Blackbaud’s roadmap. If you’re worried about it, ask Blackbaud support directly and check their announcements rather than relying on forum speculation.
Why does the feed work in my browser but not in Tableau?
The feed is fine, so look at Tableau: saved or embedded credentials, connector version, or a server that can’t reach the endpoint.
Another option for getting Altru data out
Not every reporting need requires a live OData connection. Social Good’s Data Bridge syncs Altru query results to Google Sheets, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and other tools. For teams whose dashboards really just need a regularly updated sheet of query data, that can be a simpler path to maintain than a credential-dependent feed on someone’s desktop.
