Alteryx Server Discussions
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Like with any system the essence of debugging lies in how meaningful the logs are and Alteryx workflows are no exception. For enterprise systems using Alteryx three main aspects have to be paid attention to :
- What information to log and how
- How to access it
- Who should be alerted
What information to log and how
Answer to what is pretty straightforward, it should be what will help you identify the root cause. During the workflow execution, Alteryx will itself generate tool id, start-and-end message, and standard information generated by the tool like SQL executed by the Input tool, etc. Besides this, you can utilize the Message tool to create custom messages that will become part of the log. The Message Tool can be set up to pick up records before, during, and after the records have passed through the tool itself. This makes it useful for evaluating your dataset at different parts of your workflow.
How to access it
On the Alteryx server, there are two types of logs generated :
- Server (Engine) logs
- Workflow execution logs
Server logs contain information about the Alteryx runtime environment and are meaningful to the people supporting the Alteryx service (DevOps).
Workflow execution contains information on the processing of the business logic, data transformation, and interaction with input/output data sources. This is meaningful to the Business users and DevOps team.
As the two data sets cater to a different user base they should be persisted separately. The most common tool available in the market is Splunk, which can house this data set in two different indices with specific permissions.
Who should be Alerted
Apart from making the information available in Splunk, there is a need to alert Business users and/or DevOps team in case of specific events. These events could be categorized into two broad categories
- Business events — these include failures due to incorrect data type, business calculation, etc. which Business users should know so that they know the cause of failure and can take corrective action.
- Events related to interfacing systems — these cover unavailability of feeds, databases, API services, etc. which DevOps team should be notified for followup
As both the events need immediate attention, they are best served by an email alert and can be set up using the Workflow “Events”. This is found under “Events” in the workflow configuration panel.
In this way, you achieve the following:
- Provide self-service log review capability to Business users
- Separate out service and workflow related information
- Create an immutable source of logs using Splunk for audit
- Generate alerts for Business and Service events
