Data Connections used by a Workflow

[Franz]

I might be missing something here but as far as I know there is no feature (user or admin) providing a list of data connections being used by a specific workflow. And conversely, which workflows use a given data connection. This should work for both 'Standard' Data Connections as well as the DCM. 

[JalenBraegelmann]

You would have to parse the workflow XML's to determine the configuration of each tool in a given workflow. It is possible, but not easy to accomplish. It would be nice if Alteryx provided a solution for this instead of building a homegrown solution. Here's an example of our attempt at parsing workflows and the metadata we are able to retrieve: 

Each row is a tool within a given workflow. Each workflow has an ID and a author ID. Depending on the tool you can parse out different elements of the tool including the query/table names and the connection alias which could be used to tie back to connections on the server or in DCM.

[Franz]

Thanks Jelen, nice effort on this.  I would say that Alteryx could do something along those lines, all the information is there.

Thx.

Franz

[AudreyMcPfe]

I'm also on a quest to get workflow metadata surfaced.  there is a gold mine of information that could be used to self-document data lineage and up/downstream dependencies.  Impact analyses for could be performed in minutes across workflows, instead of days or weeks.

As a start, having a view with these would introduce a ton of value:

• Workflow Name
• WF Owner Name
• WF Created Date
• WF Last Modified Date
• WF Last Modified User
• Published Version #
• Max WF Version # (can compare to the above to ensure they are in sync)
• List of data sources including which gallery connection or connection credentials were used (except passwords of course)
• List of tables & columns that were queried as part of each input tool
• List of tables & columns that were output as part of each output tool

@AnnaELawrence 

[Franz]

G'Day Audrey,

have you checked the auditing level on the Gallery (a configuration item). These attributes may already be available once the correct level is selected. The downside of course is that these logs would grow a lot as a result of more data being captured & stored (in the MongoDB). There are multiple logs - Worker, Gallery, Engine etc.

At the same time, information can be partially collected by requesting information through APIs, ('...however details of workflows contents are subject of parsing workflows themselves, they are not captured by Gallery...');

Understandably Alteryx is reluctant to make this public or easier to get to.

Cheers.

[AudreyMcPfe]

@Franz , we do have MONGO extracts writing to Oracle for the run level data, but not yet for the workflow entity.  It's the "easier to get to" part that I am suggesting is enhanced.  This information is highly valuable to business users like myself that manage large galleries, and in that role, we don't have access to server logs.

To your point, I am working through my platform team in conjunction with our Alteryx client success manager to surface this information but, in my opinion, having it closer to the surface in Designer would benefit a broad audience.

[marcusblackhill]

Hi @Franz !

You can find it extracting and matching two collections from MongoDB. If I'm not mistaken, it is the dataConnections from AlteryxGallery database and AS_PackageDefinitions from AlteryxService, using their Ids to match.

For the AS_PackageDefinitions, you will need first to extract the data from the ServiceData field due to that be a blob, but there you will find the data connections used by the workflow.

To extract data from the service data field, you can use the tool shared on that article: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Knowledge-Base/Query-Scheduler-Database-from-Alteryx...