Recommended Third Party Monitoring Tools for Instrumenting Flows

Question

Hello Alteryx Server forums,

We're a heavy Alteryx shop and recently we've been looking into setting up some sort of instrumentation for our Workflows to be able to better observe and monitor the performance and visibility of who is running what flow, how each flow is running, etc. We have DataDog for Server/Systems monitoring, however Application Performance Monitoring (APM) does not appear to be possible with Alteryx being a closed source, C++ application. Is there any other organization or person on here who has a recommendation for a third-party APM solution that could potentially work with Alteryx? Our end goal is being able to detect bottlenecks in performance beyond the typical server metrics (CPU, Memory, Bandwidth, Ops, Throughput, etc.) to drill down into flows that could be better written or to ultimately be more efficient.

Appreciate any thoughts on this topic, thank you.

Jonathan G
IT Team
TargetSmart Communications

hroderick · Answer

This discusses what I meant by a %stat% variables used in an email event,   https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Email-Events-Wildcard-Documentation/td-p/60937

ITTeam · Answer

Hroderick and raychase -- thank you both, if there's a formal document or guide that you can provide to be able to set up your solutions properly, we're open to investigating it.

hroderick -- What sort of information does %stats% capture? Have you used this to identify bottlenecks in workflows before?
raychase -- If these are posted in the Public Gallery or elsewhere such as in a GitHub repo, or that script that parses all workflows for poor dev practices, that sounds pretty awesome and we'd definitely check this out.

raychase · Answer

I've written several custom macros, leveraging the MongoDB Input connector, to query relevant data from the Alteryx Server repository and store it in a separate SQL environment.  From there, I've created various forms of analytical reporting, focused on run times, queue times, excessive scheduling, etc.

I've also scripted a job that downloads all workflows from the Alteryx Server and parses through their .xml content to identify poor development practices (ie. SELECT * queries or excessive flat-file input sources).