SFTP feature in Download Tool

Hi,
Just learnt today that Download Tool doesn't support uploading to a SFTP server. This feature is pretty critical and essential for many use in the Enterprise world. Is this something we can expect in next release?
-Hemanth

Implemented

Data Connectors

Category Input Output

Comments

PoornimaF

Dear Hemanth,

Thanks for submitting this request. We are constantly adding new features to the Download tool based on customer feedback and so will keep this in mind. We are currently not targeting for the SFTP feature in the next release, but it is in our roadmap.

Thanks,
Poornima

adrian_loong

We also find the sftp is really important feature that needs to be made easier in alteryx to support enterprise customers.

dawid_nawrot

To ous business it is also very crucial to be able to Download or Upload files to and from SFTP. Many businesses just don't consider anything else..

jayson_robinson

+1 for this. I would consider this the most required feature in our organisation.

ARich

jacob_a_merchant

Agreed, this is a feature we would definitely make use of.

bchumbley

This is a critical process for our company to have automation to run a campaign on a daily basis and have it automatically post to an SFTP site..

anelson5

I concur, having SFTP functionality would ease the burden of development significantly for our organization.

TylerN

Agreed, this functionality would be fantastic!

JCR

This is in the backlog under reference US14802. Will update the thread as we have more details on a possible delivery date.

ARich

Hi All,

Thanks for all of the comments and requests on this feature.

In order to provide the best functionality, we'd like to better understand the uses cases for uploading to SFTP. What types of files are you uploading? How often are you uploading? How big are the files that you're uploading? etc.

Any details that can be provided are greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Alex

TylerN

@AlexP, for our organization it's CSV files that are being uploaded on a daily or monthly basis. Files sizes tend to be 5 megabytes or less. I'm sure other organizations are sending larger files though...

jacob_a_merchant

Currently: XML inbound and CSV outbound, several times daily. Filesize ranges from 5k to 500k, averaging 150k.

We have other use cases we could build with this capability.

dawid_nawrot

Several types of behaviour are used in our company. Daily/Weekly/Monthly download, from x000 to x000000 records in a file. CSV, TXT, EXCEL, ZIP

jgreene

Throwing in my two cents on this topic:

My company receives the same sorts of files but I'd add PGP into the list as well. I could also see this feature being added to a more robust scheduler where a job is defined which would consist of one or more of:

- Download some file inputs

- Decrypt/unzip files

- Run one or more Alteryx modules in sequence

- Encrypt/zip some outputs

- Directory cleanup

- Upload outputs

This would also allow for failure conditions in the file retrieval/post/preparation process to be more easily isolated from failures within the Alteryx modules. Were this functionality made available in the download tool I would probably still opt to use our current 3rd party scheduler to retain this sort of job process control. If it was rolled into the Alteryx scheduler I'd happily switch over to use that.

jeremy_dalletezze

We mainly upload csv and zip files, nothing larger than 500mb, and mostly under 10mb, hope this helps.

Glad to see that Alteryx is working on this

arnold_slabbekoorn

Daily, weekly, monthly frequency would be required for my company. File format, txt, CSV, excel, PDF, XML. File size, should not have a limitation.

dawid_nawrot

Any news on this feature?

ARich

Hi All,

Thanks for all of the feedback! We are currently planning to have SFTP support in the Download tool completed for 10.5.

Best,

Alex

ARich

scottiewardell

@AlexP i see you marked this as completed but I still cant get an SFTP file to work ... where can I find more instructions?

TaraM

Hi @scottiewardell - check out this knowledge base article. It should give you all the instruction you need.

Upload to SFTP/FTP - More Examples with Alteryx 10.5

scottiewardell

@TaraM thanks for the help! Unfortunately the issue is I need to download. I need to identify the directory from the FTP then run some logic to find the most recent version of a file, then download it. The problem is one of the subfolders of the FTP site is throwing off "Error: Download (8): Error transferring data: Error in the SSH layer". That error only occurs for the one subfolder I need, but does not occur for any of the other subfolders. Any ideas? @AlexP

jeremy_dalletezze

I keep getting the same error, "Error transferring data: Error in the SSH layer", when trying to upload, but I have yet to submit a case.

scottiewardell

@jeremy_dalletezze I was able to fix it - I think for me it was a file size issue of the target folder/file and the download was taking too long so the tool timed out. A few things I did that seemed to fix it...

1 - on the "connection" tab I changed max connections to 10 and changed timeout to 10,000

2 - running the workflow via our alteryx server scheduler worked much faster than trying to run it on my desktop, if you potentially have access to a faster server