Alteryx Server Setup - admin domain users for the server

Question

Longtime Alteryx Designer user, but have never set up or administered Server. I'm working with my IT department to install Alteryx Server on a Windows VM in our data center. In order to set up the VM, the IT guys are asking me who to "add as Admin Domain Users for the server or Local Users." I confess I'm not an infrastructure and spinning up a server. Would appreciate any guidance on how to answer this question for setting up the server itself.

MikeSp · Accepted Answer

Hi @hansgruber ,

It sounds like your IT team is asking who you want to be able to login locally (for example, through Remote Desktop Connection) to the server. The good news is that Alteryx Server doesn't typically require that general users be granted this particular permission.

As far as a recommendation, my personal thoughts would be to only grant admin for anyone that needs to be able to administrate the back-end of Alteryx Server. Things like, but not limited to:

* Installing Alteryx Server
* Running Alteryx Server backups or restorations
* Changing Alteryx Server configurations
* Installing additional software or drivers on the server machine for use with Alteryx (R tools, database drivers, etc)
* General administration work
* Installing additional tools
* Upgrading Alteryx Server

For local users, I don't have any particular recommendations here as none are necessary for the use of Alteryx Server.

If you wish to use the "Run As User" capabilities of Alteryx Server - where you can run a workflow as a specific user account for things like access to shared drives or databases that require a Windows login, you will need to grant "Log on as a batch job" access as well as some other permissions. You can find more about the required permissions at the link below, and your IT team should be able to use this documentation as well.

https://help.alteryx.com/current/server/set-required-run-user-permissions

With the above, what some customers do is have their IT team create a security group in Active Directory, and then add that group to the above permissions. This allows users to be added and removed from a group to allow/disallow access, and if you plan on using Windows Authentication on your Gallery, this group could also perform double duty as an access group!