Customer Managed Telemetry - Is this what I'm looking for?

Question

We're currently using Desktop Designer and Alteryx Server and have not yet moved to Cloud.  I'm looking for a way to more efficiently, accurately, and completely analyze our various workflows.  Specifically, I want to identify and log all the input and output files (full file paths would be great) for all the workflows in our Gallery and stored locally.  We're trying to maintain a document that lists the input and output files in our workflows so we can quickly see the impact if one of our yxdbs (or other datasets) gets corrupted or otherwise compromised.

I was told that the Customer Managed Telemetry tool would do what I'm looking for but doing some research on the community I'm not really sure. It has not been installed in our Designer yet so I haven't been able to test it out.

If the Customer Managed Telemetry will not do this, how can this be accomplished?

KGT · Answer

Adding to this for anyone that comes across it.

Something I've implemented at a customer previously was having all the desktop logs reporting to a network location and a centralised workflow parsing them and reporting on them.

You can set up the location for logs in User Settings. That information is then stored in RuntimeSettings.xml. So, this can be deployed when Alteryx is installed via Company Portal/Group Policy (or whatever is used by IT in your org) to also update that file with the network location. A little setup, but then just works.

Note: I also try to set up Macro Directories etc via the same on install.

mmichaelson · Answer

Hi @DavidKennedy - I recently implemented Customer Managed Telemetry for our organization.  Having seen how it produces data, I think the answer to your question is "no".

Customer Managed Telemetry does provide source and destination information; however, it only provides it for workflows that have been run via Alteryx Designer on a user's local PC.  Additionally, the file paths, connection strings, etc. aren't logged consistently, so you'd likely have to do some additional cleanup to get these into a useful format.

@terry10's suggestion makes sense since it can be applied on either Alteryx Server or on desktop.  However, it seems like this would also only give you information for workflows that have been run - Terry, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Your best bet may be to develop a workflow that:

* Downloads all workflows from Alteryx Server.  You can use the Server API tool to do this, assuming you have API access.
* Reads all workflows as XML files and parses the XML for the source & destination data.  You can use the Workflow XML Parser tool to do this.

Hope this helps!

terry10 · Answer

I haven't used Customer Managed Telemetry, however, I have created a batch macro that parses Alteryx log files and identifies all inputs and outputs.