Alteryx Connect Ideas

When Alteryx connect is first installed to a company with a small alteryx designer base, you do not benefit from lineage.

There are not much workflows at hand. So in order to realize Alteryx connect's immediate benefits I'd like to suggest;

a company-wide Data Quality Score.

1. Let's score each data element in distributed data stores
2. And automatically give a simple scale between one and five
   • 1 equals to, “we don’t know”
   • 2 data is entered or updated prior to 1 year, has conflicting data
   • 3 would be the norm and means customer provided this data, as accurate and as up-to-date as they have entered it and ‘agreed’ to share with you.
   • 4 means we cross checked the data with 3rd party sources or the addresses work in Google Maps”.
   • 5 equals to “we had the customer or the representative validated the address in last 3 months”.
3. The scale will be based on;
   • Missingness
   • Information value (variance is high or not, if there is no variance no info useful thru the column)
   • How many times that column is addressed in other tables
   • Format (structured like a telephone number ###-##-## or semi structured like an address)
   • Is it an ID column
   • Is it a Datetime column, any discrepancies in date time columns etc.
   • Time since last update of data
4. Once we have some lineage information than we'll weight th data based on how frequently it's needed, how many formulas are requiring the field etc.

And as soon as we install connect we'll have a grand vision of our data and even we'll be able to track the status of our whole distributed data assets with a trend line if we are going better or worse... Here is an example;

We have some scheduled workflows that utilize the download tool for API calls. When we scrape them with connect there aren't any references to them in the "Relationships" or "Data Connections" areas.

Even if this is something that would be difficult for Alteryx to scrape through a workflow, I would love the ability to create entities like this and manually connect them as a data source. Like we have some partners where there 10 to 15 API calls are required to pull the entire data set. It would be great to know which workflows reference those APIs so that if changes are made on their side, we can easily identify which workflows are impacted.

I published a workflow today that scans a directory for files and then pushes them to a Dynamic Input. I noticed that on Connect there is no relationship there anywhere referencing that we are scraping a directory. 

Connect has the db inputs and outputs and the "File Input" that references what the Dynamic input is originally set to go find, but there is nothing referencing the directory other than any notes that I have added to the description. 

The reason that I think this may be important. We connect to a folder where FTP files are dumped by a powershell script and we want to go through that folder with Alteryx and pull and upload as needed. However the file that existed in the original input (when we created this workflow) no longer exists. So the visual relationship is broken in Connect as soon as that file is dropped. If perhaps we don't have a tool that references this sort of connection to a directory, having the ability to designate a dynamic connection to the original file might be good instead. We just want to be able for those in the future to reference a location, rather than a file that hasn't existed in a while.

Connect applies a standard set of weightings to different categories of information (people, terms etc.) when returning search results. When combined with likes/dislikes, these determine the order in which results are returned - details below:

Alteryx Connect uses the following scoring parameters for the Lucene engine:

• Likes and Dislikes, using the following formula: (Number of Likes) / (Number of Likes + Number of Dislikes).
• Certified assets: +1.2
• Person: +2.4
• Term: +2.2
• Report: +2
• Report sheet: +1.8
• Alteryx workflow: +1.5
• Table: +1.4

It would be useful to have control over this weighting, e.g. when you have large numbers of Person records being returned before Terms; but advice from Customer Support has been that these are not currently customisable. I'd like to request that this ability be considered for inclusion in a future release of Connect.

Clicking the ‘Use in Workflow’ button in connect downloads a workflow file with the Table which I can open in Alteryx Designer.

When I open in Alteryx it asks for Userid/PW but there is no option for SSO (single sign on):

If I leave the username and password blank then the connection fails and I get an error.

In the case of SSO the connection string should be:

SSO:  odbc:Driver={HDBODBC};SERVERNODE=saphXXX.europe.company.com:30415;Trusted_connection=yes;

instead of this: 

UseridPW:  odbc:Driver={HDBODBC};SERVERNODE=saphXXX.europe.company.com:30415;UID=USERNAME;PWD=__EncPwd1__

Please note ALL of our users use SSO so current functionality is useless to us.

I have raised this as a bug with support but as usual they ask me to post here.

This option should also ask if the connection is In-DB connection also per this post:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Connect-Ideas/Have-In-Db-input-as-an-option-when-selecting-...

@OndrejCsummarizes connect as "a state-of-the-art Data Catalog with a social twist".  

I define it in a broader fashion as data analytics social network, a collective intelligence or #datahive...

I would propose adding Analytics projects and related documents and the relevant relationship data;

• Project charter,
• Solution approach document,
• Data dictionary,
• Project timeline (a gantt chart etc.)
• Roles & responsibilities

 into the picture so that any team can track their Data Science project progress there...

 Here is a nice process flow view of a DS process

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/machine-learning/team-data-science-process/overview

 A Microsoft Project view of the Analytics projects at hand...

as per the title, when selecting "Use in workflow" a user should have the option to connect with the in-db tools when applicable rather than being stuck on a green input tool with an odbc connection. Ditto when searching from the omnibox in designer. 

Would Alteryx please consider putting a "notes" page for gallery apps.  This would help the developer of the apps give notes and "how-to's" to the users.  

It would be great if we can have a conversation feed like twitter or yammer in Alteryx Connect Homepage!!! That will up the social platform a notch. #PleaseMakeItHappen! :D 

Our department has a site that manages request access to database, application...etc. The user will have better experience with the tool when they can click on the request access button and it directs them to the form that we use. 

Wouldn't it be great if Alteryx Connect can show badges earned in a user profile like how you have it in the Alteryx community? It would give people more incentive to contribute their knowledge and engage in the tool. This also give visibility to the leaders. 

It would be great if there is a way to highlight all the certifications ( ex. Alteryx, Tableau...etc.) that our users earned in their profile. This will help promote data literacy in our community and help users connect to the experts. 

Connect has the ability to visually see 1 level of dependancy (in the Nexus view).

For an asset owner - it is very important to be able to see ALL upstream / downstream dependancies to be able to understand impact.   Key here is answering the question "who will be impacted if I change XX"

This should include asset; owner; and depth - preferrably in a tree format.

CC: @DavidM @Arianna_Fuller

The asset sniffers are currently rudimentary - they are Alteryx Analytical Apps which need to be created by the admin team and then scheduling these.

This could be better controlled by a simple UI in the Connect Admin portal rather than requiring users to create their own jobs in Alteryx to do the sniffing. 

CC: @DavidM @Arianna_Fuller

Connect offers functionality for users to chat about data & analytical assets.

However - in order to meet regulatory obligations in a regulated Financial Services company - this communication needs to be surveiled by compliance.

Please could  you provide an API for this data to be monitored by compliance teams in near-real-time?

cc: @dataMack

 @DavidM @Arianna_Fuller

In a large environment- especially an analytical environment - copies of data will often appear in multiple places.    an example of this is where a copy of a shared dimension or a shared piece of reference data is copied in multiple different data marts.

In order to manage this - we need to be able to mark these as copies of each other so that we can point folk to the golden-source; and so that we don't need to document this asset multiple different times.

Example:

- Client List appears in the data lake; on the Sales data mart; on the Finance data mart; etc

- We would want to group all 3 of these together; and mark the Data Lake version as the master; and all the others as copies.

User experience:

• When I navigate to any Sales assets - it tells me that the Client List is a data asset which is used
• When i click on this - it tells me that the sales version is a copy - and directs me to the one on the data lake

NOTE: There are circumstances where a copy may be deliberately filtered or incomplete (for example - regional subsets of clients) - in this case the relationship needs to be "Partial Copy" not "Copy"

CC: @DavidM @Arianna_Fuller

In order to ensure that assets are managed through the process from discovery through correct tagging - a configurable workflow is required to ensure that this process can be managed.

•  Asset Owners
• When an asset is discovered – first step is to associate an owner.
• If the database already has an owner, and this is a new table – default to the DB owner.   For Tableau or Alteryx assets you can see the owner from the canvas.    If no owner is obvious - this then goes to an Admin to assign an owner
• Owner can re-assign
• Needs to be two owners for every asset
• Once the owner is confirmed – meta-data needs to be captured
• Then this needs to be checked against standard taxonomy
• Then this description is pushed out
• Admin team need to be able to spot and manage items which are not yet correctly captured or described

CC: @DavidM @Arianna_Fuller

In order for us to make sense of Connect assets in an environment with hundreds of users; thousands of canvasses and databases etc - we need to strongly categorise and describe every asset using mandatory tags.

Every asset needs to have mandatory tags

- The admin team set up the list of tags which are required for different types of assets 

- For example - every Alteryx Canvas may need Product; Process; Team - every DB table may need Product and Tech Team

Admin team need to be able to define these tags and the acceptable values (which can be a tree)

When searching for assets - these meta-tags need to be available as filters

Example:

• Asset is identified by the scanners and brought into Connect
• Owner is then required to describe their asset using the mandatory tags set up by the admin team
• Product (this is a tree that would be controlled centrally – admin can add or update this list; users have to select 1 or more products that this canvas relates to)
• Business line
• Team (tree based)
• Is this regulatory (Y/N)
• Public / Private
• Plain-text description
• In this case – every asset needs 6 tags; with the taxonomy(valid values) controlled centrally

CC: @DavidM @Arianna_Fuller

For assets identified in Connect - we are currently not able to identify an asset as being a UAT version of a Prod asset.   Instead, these are listed as 2 completely different assets with no relationship between them.

This will be confusing for consuming users since they won't know which to use; and wasteful for the people capturing data about this asset since they will need to capture the info several times.

Request: Please create the ability to tag a given Alteryx / Tableau / Database server as "UAT / Dev / Prod", which will automatically tag the asset with this type.   Then allow asset owners to relate the prod and Dev version together as the same thing, but in different states.

Thus, when you search you will find 1 asset with several different states rather than 3 assets.

CC: @DavidM @Arianna_Fuller

Would be good to create an Alteryx Connect plugin for Tableau so that you can access Connect from Tableau?  Would improve user experience if the user can access the information catalog without leaving their BI tool.  So for example, have an Alteryx Connect sidebar in Tableau to allow you to search for a table or file then click and add as a data source and immediately start data discovery/analysis.