Promotion to production

[SeanAdams]

In a controlled environment, there is a need to control promotion of assets to prod with basic controls to ensure that someone has tested, signed off, that it meets certain quality standards (like "no warnings", "no Run Commands", "all reports must have company logo on top left" etc).

However, at the moment there doesn't appear to be a promotion process in Alteryx to control this flow, so assets are copied across by an admin.   This is very manual and error prone (many times we've had the wrong assets copied), and it also means that this process is controlled in a workflow outside of Alteryx (e.g. A JIRA queue or similar).

Could we request that Alteryx look into a production promotion process, which allows the admin team to perform any required checks (including automated checks), and then pushes this into prod stamped with the designer's Kerberos rather than the sys admin?

Joint idea with @avinashbonu @DamianA  @BenBu

[patrick_digan]

This feature is much needed. We‘ve endured some tough conversations with our IT counterparts who remain alarmed that we don’t have a good native way to promote things from development to production.

[KylieF]

Hi @SeanAdams,

The best way to elevate an idea's priority is to encourage liking on the idea. Comments with use cases are also highly valued. The more engagement we see an idea get from Community members, the sooner we can suggest to our Product teams to look into it or encourage them to revisit the idea again.

[atChrisLee]

This would be very helpful. Currently Alteryx use and value is limited at my company because people are afraid to sign-off on canvases. It has become an administrative nightmare for my controls and development team because there is no "stamp of approval" baked into the assets themselves. 

[Cal_A]

As someone who has spent the last 15 years looking at controls in Financial Services, I think this a key area for Alteryx. It is great to see manual processes automated, but the lack of an integrated solution here actually can either increase risk, or reduce efficiency when implementing Alteryx workflows.  @SeanAdams is absolutely right and many of your larger customers would face the same challenges I imagine.

[justindavis]

@SeanAdams We're sort of stuck as far as getting workflows into a production environment because of many of the concerns you've raised, particularly with SOX. Do you have a system you've been able to effectively utilize to handle dev-test-prod for your workflows?

@patrick_digan  would appreciate your input as well, as it seems your comments hit right on the money with the experience we're having

[SeanAdams]

Hi @justindavis ,

Currently we use a combination:
- JIRA to capture meta-data about the alteryx canvas; and to ask people for signoffs.   Unfortunately Connect does not yet work across a multi-stage environment, otherwise we would use Connect for the asset details from dev to prod

- Sharepoint to capture the documentation about the canvs

- Alteryx meta-data fields to tie the canvas to the JIRA ID

- Service Now (or an IT ticketing system) to log a service ticket for our IT team to move the canvas from UAT to prod

    Our Tech partners then log into the server, and manually copy the canvas across from UAT to Prod

- Excel as a catalog for the production assets with recertification dates so that people recertify the ownership and permissioning.

[CristonS]

At this time we are unable to include this idea in our near future roadmap due to competing priorities; as such we're updating the status to Not Planned. However, should this change or we become able to return to this idea in the future we'll be sure to post an update.

[champybh]

A native promotion process from Dev/QA to Production is essential, especially for larger organizations. Surprised there's so little interest overall in the community and Alteryx itself. I'm commenting just to add my support for this feature