Alteryx Designer Ideas

We frequently have issues where users report slowness from an Alteryx installation on a particular machine; or where a specific tool or package fails to install correctly.

For our admin teams - this becomes a debugging exercise to go through different permutations to understand the cause - and if this is escallated to Alteryx Support, this becomes even tougher.

Could we think about including a basic "Self Diagnostic" in to Alteryx which runs through the basic functionalities of Alteryx with some basic timings; checks that Python is working correctly; checks the memory allocation and temporary disk space - and then either persists this to disk and/or sends to a central environment for analysis?

Given a large deployed environment like ours (over 10 000 seats deployed) - self-checkout-telemetry like this would provide the central team with massive increase in their ability to manage the deployed base; and at the same time signficantly reduce the time to resolve support issues.

Hi Alteryx

I understand why you need to keep bloat away from the product and have tools available to download instead, it means you can iterate and update them outside the usual cadence cycles. But please, for the love of everything holy, make it easier to find them and download them.

Let me give you an example of downloading the Google Sheets Input Tool:

1. I type in the amazing search and find a help article on it, so far so good:

2. I am pointed to the Gallery:

3. I click but where do I look? I need to revert to the tiny search in the top left. This isn't obvious for new users

4. but the search doesn't come top, how some of these search results get in above what I need I have no idea. I get to page 4 before I see something that looks like what I need before I realise it is a third party tool having installed it. I come back, can't find the tool and so give up. If it's there somewhere then it needs to be more obvious.

5. I google - I finally find (third item) something that's more useful but only because I know what I'm looking for

6. I run the workflow, then run it again as per the instructions. At this point I'm losing the will to live tbh.

7. Finally something that looks useful, I bang the huge download button twice and wonder why it didn't work.

9. I read the text and realise I need to click the link - finally I have the installer.

That was a five minute job. It was painful. And I'm a seasoned Alteryx user. If I was a new user, I'd have given up at step 2 or 3.

But what was the thing I downloaded in Step 8? A set of release notes and links....why aren't these simply added to the help article I found in Step 1/2? It would surely be easier for you, and would be a whole lot easier for users. Why do we need this painful process?

Please please please make it easier for me to install new tools.

There are quite a few instances reported in my ognization that user terminates the intallation process since it takes more than one hour and user tends to believe that the intallation process is somehow "failing". So they terminate the installation and try to install again.

A kind reminding message such as "This will approximatly take one hour, and you can enjoy your coffee break" something like that would definetely help.

Please kindly consider.

We aren't getting a huge amount of help from support on this, so I'm posting this idea to raise awareness for the product teams responsible for the Salesforce connectors and the embedded Python environment.

This post from user Dubya describes the issue in detail:

I have a workflow with several salesforce tools in it, which works fine on my machine. But we need another alteryx user in our office to be able to access, run and maintain the workflow too, via their machine and copy of alteryx designer.

However we're finding that the salesforce inputs and outputs can only be authenticated on one machine at a time.

When the other new user opens the original workflow from the shared network location, the salesforce tools display an error "Salesforce Input (1): {'error': 'invalid_grant', 'error_description': 'authentication failure'}" and the tools fail to load any data. But we can see the full query in the tool and we can even set the custom query option and validate the query successfully, which suggests the source is being correctly connected to and queried, but we just cant run the tool.

The only way to run the tool successfully is to change the credentials and re-authenticate the tool. However this then de-authenticates the original machine, and when we open up the workflow on there and try to run ying the workflow brings back the same error.

We've both tried this authentication back and forth on our own machines and each time one of us re-authenticates, it de-authenticates the other, leading to it triggering the error.

Can someone help explain what's going on and how to fix it, as this doesn't bode well for our collaboration.

We're both running:
The latest build of version of designer 2021.2 (original machine also running desktop automation)
Salesforce Input Tool v4.1.0
Salesforce Output Tool v1.3.0

My response here identifies that this is a problem for our organization as well:

We're experiencing the same issue. It appears to be related to how the tool handles password and security token decryption. I've found that when you modify the related registry entry from "true" to "false", you can see in the tool's xml that the encrypted password and security token are still in there. I'm not sure what else is going on behind the scenes beyond that, but that ought to be addressable by the product teams handling the Salesforce connectors and the Python installation embedded in Designer.

The only differences in our environment compared to u/Dubya's are that we're running on 2020.4 and attempting to use Salesforce Input Tool v4.2.4.

This is a must have for anyone who needs the ability to share workflows among multiple users. This is part of a series of problems that these updated connectors have been plagued with since introducing them years ago, and no one at Alteryx seems to care enough to truly fix the problems. Salesforce is a core system for our organization, so having tools that utilize the latest version of Salesforce's APIs is very important to us. The additional features that the Input tool provides are welcome, but these bugs have to be sorted out in order for us to extract any kind of value out of them. If the "deprecated" Salesforce tools were ever to be removed from Designer while there are issues with the "new" connectors, we would have no choice other than to never upgrade Designer/Server again and be forced to look for another product to serve as our ETL platform.

Please, please, please address this.

Idea: Build a version of Designer that runs on ARM devices without requiring an emulator.

Windows 10 on ARM is becoming an increasingly popular option for new devices.  Also, with Apple's move toward ARM, virtualized instances of Windows on Mac will either need to be the ARM version or will have much better performance over an emulated version of x64 Windows 10.

Emulated software is considerably slower than native binaries, so to maintain Alteryx's fast performance, an ARM version of Designer would be the best way forward for those looking to move to ARM platforms.

What about allowing us to maintain the same active license / activation info on 2 devices simultaneously, but automatically deactivating the license on the other device when the program is used? Almost all software these days allows users to do full installation and activation on secondary devices, but restricts the use of the software to a number of active devices at any point in time. The current process of juggling a clunky transfer process (and temporary "demo" installs when that fails) just to be able to work on an office desktop during the day and a laptop at night / home is a brutal restriction on users.

This has been brought up many times and is always ignored. The current license approach is no longer a simple inconvenience now that we are living in the age of Covid. The ability to easily move between computers is a necessity in order for us to manage the constant unpredictable work arrangements of our modern world. Please address this issue.

I understand the difficulties of making Alteryx Designer and Alteryx Server available for Linux but there are so many organizations and possibilities for development and scaling on Linux environments. It would be incredibly helpful if Alteryx was available on Linux. Please strongly consider.

Hello all,

First of all, I really appreciate the effort made by Alteryx to provide an efficient way to try the software, especially the nonAdmin install. It helped me a lot to show Alteryx to Tableau or Qlik Users, solving in a few minutes their use cases. But there is still a little thing that can break the "whaoo effect" : for the trial, you just have an installer and this installer can be blocked by security. It happened to me today and it was SOOOOOO frustrating.


Best regards,

Simon

I review a lot of alteryx workflows as part of my job. When I'm reviewing a canvas, I often want to advance to the incoming or outgoing tool. Please create a keyboard shortcut like control+I or control+O to quickly navigate to the incoming or outgoing tool on the canvas. 

When Alteryx Designer detects an existing 32-bit Oracle driver on a user's machine, it displays an error message saying  that it requires a 64-bit driver.  If there is no driver at all installed, it will go ahead and install one. 

Can we get Alteryx to simply prompt the user to install the 64-bit driver instead of the 32-bit driver present error message? 

(I know they can co-exist since removing the 32-bit driver will cause Alteryx to install its own 64-bit driver after which one can re-install the 32-bit driver.)

Thanks!

D

I've been using the Intelligence Suite to automate building models using assisted modelling, It works great. However If I then output the model to the Python tool I ran into a few issues. The Intelligence Suite relies on the EvalML library so I wanted to use the python tool to use the model created with some of EvalML's other features such as prediction explanations.

What I found was that the intelligence suite for 2021.3.5 uses EvalML version '0.13.2' which is from 2 years ago meaning a lot of the extra features are not available.

It would be great with each new Alteryx intelligence suit the EvalML package also updated.