Make it easier for administrators to recover "deleted" workflows

[Claje]

Alteryx Server does a pretty good job of tracking all the information you need in order to find out who ran a workflow at a given time, even if that workflow has been deleted from the Gallery.

However, if I need to identify what that workflow actually did on a specific date, and that version is no longer available on the Gallery, it gets really hard to track down.

There are some posts throughout the community on leveraging the MongoDB to try and reconstruct this, but in some cases the workflow is "Chunked" and becomes impossible for an end user to reconstruct.

I spoke to support about this recently and they suggested that by using the Scheduler, I could schedule the historical instance of the workflow and then "Really quickly" grab it when it was reconstructed from the temporary staging folder used by our Alteryx Server.  This has a few concerns, among them, finding a way to run this workflow so that the files can be created but it has no impact on tables, for instance if the given workflow drops a table as part of its execution.  Additionally, the only way to schedule with a different set of permissions in a 1-Worker environment is to change the default "Run Workflows As" to a different user, who also needs permission to access all files on the Alteryx Server.  This can also impact any other Scheduled or Gallery job that is executed while this recovery is underway, effectively causing downtime to do file recovery.

These restrictions are specific enough as to be impractical for most organizations using Alteryx Gallery/Server.

I think this could be solved by adding to the Scheduler an option along the lines of "Download a copy of the workflow", available to administrators. Ideally this copy could include some important metadata, like when that version of the workflow was uploaded, who uploaded it, and its ID/Version Number from the Gallery.

This would go a long way towards making it easier to Audit and respond to requests for historical information about Alteryx Workflows on the Server, and since the Alteryx Engine can already recreate these workflows, I think that a basic version of this feature could simply save out that temporary file, rather than executing it.

[JulieM]

@Claje thank you for the detailed post on this idea and why this would be very helpful to have as a feature.  We will definitely keep this in mind as a consideration for a future enhancement to Server and I will look forward to seeing any comments/votes from others who would find this useful as well.  

[SeanAdams]

Fully agree with you @Claje - this is one of many different areas that we need deeper admin support on the server side.

[Bob_Blackey]

This is a key ability.

I just came across a situation where a workflow was created and scheduled months ago. The author has since left the company and there apparently wasn't a "passing of the Alteryx torch" and no one has the workflow. The scheduler shows that it was uploaded from his documents folder. So the one copy that exists is the one on the scheduler. Can't imagine that this is that unusual a situation.

[KylieF]

Updating this idea's status back to Under Review, to be in line with past product updates.

[KylieF]

Thank you for your post! This idea is being updated to the Revisit status as we like this idea and it's something we'd like to keep in mind for future updates, but cannot put on the roadmap at this time. We'll update the status however once we have a better idea on if and when it could be included in the roadmap.

[Bigmonki]

I try to keep my studio up to date and remove unwanted or older versions of workflows. Yesterday, I inadvertently delete a workflow by mistake and it hadn't saved a copy on my laptop.

Talking to your tech team, to my horror I discovered that there is no 'Recycle bin' on Alteryx server. There were suggestions of how to recover it, all of which I was very grateful, but a lot of work to rectify a mistake.

My suggestion is for a recycle bin in scheduler so when a mistake is made, you have the ability to retrieve your work. It could have a time limit setting to automatically empty the bin after a set period or size, deleting the oldest files first?

[CristonS]

Yikes @Bigmonki, I'm sorry that happened to you! I'm glad you were able to recover it. We appreciate feedback on pain points, it helps our product team with future planning and understanding users needs more directly.