Alteryx Server Ideas

As the title says: please make the date modified data more granular e.g. yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM:SS and not 6 months ago

The current behaviour is the same in designer & browser, but is more important in browser (first screenshot) as there isn't an indicator or method or sorting the order.

Currently it's impossible to tell which worker a job is running on. Add a column to the jobs view that shows what worker a job is currently running on.

The gallery shouldn't allow to create data connections with already existing names.

For example, in designer it's difficult to choose which data connection we want to work with if they have the same name, please verify the images in attachment.

I would suggest a service split to simplify maintenance actions in the Alteryx Server.

Split Alteryx Service into 5 services:

 Alteryx controller

• Dependencies: Alteryx Database
• Purpose: Controls job submissions
• Meaning: The Alteryx controller Service stopped means neither the users or the scheduler can submit new jobs

Alteryx Database

• Dependencies: N/A
• Purpose: Database
• Meaning: The Alteryx Database Service stopped means all the platform is down

Alteryx Gallery

• Dependencies: Alteryx Database
• Purpose: Controls the Web UI
• Meaning: Alteryx Gallery Service stopped means the gallery web page is down

Alteryx Scheduler

• Dependencies: Alteryx controller, Alteryx Database
• Purpose: Controls the scheduled jobs
• Meaning: The Alteryx Scheduler Service stopped means the users can still submit jobs manually but scheduled jobs wont be submited

Alteryx Worker

• Dependencies: Alteryx controller, Alteryx Database (only applicable if the server where the Alteryx Worker Service is running the Alteryx controller)
• Purpose: Executes the jobs
• Meaning: The Alteryx Worker Service stopped means no job will be executed on the node

This service split will help perform some maintenance tasks and enables the Platform Administrators to shutdown the platform correctly shutting down the services in the correct order.

Usage Example 1 (Cold Backup):

• Stop the controller so no more jobs can be submitted
• Stop all the workers
• After all the workers have stopped the Alteryx Database Service and the rest of the remaining services can be shutdown
• Preform the Cold Backup
• Start the services

Usage Example 2 (Changes in the worker configuration - By doing this the users will still have access to the gallery and their jobs):

• Make changes in the worker configuration
• Restart only the worker service

Usage Example 3 (Changes in the Gallery Page or Configurations):

• Stop the Gallery Service
• Make the changes
• Start the Gallery Service

The Gallery currently only enables scheduling of the latest version of a workflow, regardless of the published version - for instance, if there are two versions of a workflow and Version 1 is the published version, only Version 2 can be scheduled since it is more recent. There is no straightforward way to schedule Version 1.

Currently two workarounds are to:

1) download the older (published) version, export to Designer, and then save as an entirely new workflow in Gallery.

2) re-save the local Designer file of the older (published) workflow as the most recent version in Gallery, for example re-saving Version 1 as Version 3 so that "Version 1" can be scheduled.

The ability to publish and schedule older workflow versions would be a helpful new feature to add to Gallery, as this would avoid the need to re-create or duplicate workflows simply because the most recent version has an unexpected issue that the previous version does not have.

When a render tool is run on Designer pointed to a temporary file the log gives you a clickable link to access the output.  When deployed to the Gallery unless you have given it a specific output destination with %temp% in the filename you get... nothing.  

What did I expect?  The pdf or other temp file to render on the screen or at least download for me.  Or give me a dropdown selection of the various files render could create for me.

The current Gallery API executes a job until it reaches a completion state with either success or failure.  Once reaching that state, the callout to /v1/jobs/{jobId}/ will return an array of messages that can then be parsed to gather information about the execution of the job, similar to the output you see in designer or via the CLI when running a job directly.

It would be nice if the callout to the jobs endpoint would constantly update and return the messages array with each callout.  With jobs that take longer to execute, our Gallery API wrapper could then report back to us and let us know what messages have come out as the jobs runs.  For example, if a process takes 2 hours to execute, we might want to know how far along the job is or if it has met a special condition that will cause it to run longer, etc.  To do that, we could add in message tools that report info messages to us.  Unfortunately, these messages are ineffective if we are running via the API because we won't see them until the job has fully completed.

Currently, we have the functionality to set a recurring schedule with daily frequency with an option to 'Run only during work week (Mon-Fri)' I would like to add this 'Run only during work week (Mon-Fri)' option to the Hourly frequency interface. 

No current option to run on weekdays only:

Hi Team,

Currently we are using python for calling Alteryx Gallery API. We have configured gallery API access according to Alteryx document to use the OAuth 1.0a  with oauth_signature_method="HMAC-SHA1".  However, other teams have concern on HMAC-SHA1 because it’s 64 encoding only and consider not security assurance. I suggest Alteryx team to use encryption with higher encoding like SHA256.

Thanks.

Currently, failed job results stay in the Mongo DB forever.  Please either make it adhere to the same coding in the Server Settings for "Delete queue and results after (days)" setting, or make it a separate option for failed jobs. 

Hello Brainstrust,

Small request here (i think) , we are exclusively using Alteryx Gallery to host and orchestrate workflows in our enterprise. 

As we are connecting to disparate datasources involving many odbc connections and file paths at times when we are configuring a new source on all of our workers there may be a misconfiguration or misstep in the implementation.

When this happens , there is an intermittent failure and unfortunately its not visible what worker ran the workflow, I know this is visible in the thick client scheduler experience but as we are trying to drive Gallery as the one user experience it would be good if it was visible here too... screen shot below.

As a Gallery Admin I would like to be able to add and remove a user from local groups on the User page.

I realise that this would only work for local groups and that AD groups would need to be excluded (and indicated as unavailable for editing)

On the Users page it is quick and easy to see what Role each user has - UNLESS they have been assigned the "Default" role in which case it will depend on Gallery Default Role and which Group(s) they are assigned to.

I propose an additional column be added to the page to show the Effective Role for each user. The purpose of this change is to allow an administrator to quickly and easily confirm the effective Role of any Gallery use by viewing the User page, without having to check the user's group membership and the Role assignment that those groups provide.

For those users with a assigned Role other than "Default" that value will obviously match the assigned Role.

For users assigned the "Default" Role the page should show the result that would be returned by the appropriate permission resolution code when determining their effective Role from the Group membership and the Gallery Default.

[Screen image is from 2020.4 - with my suggested positioning for Effective Role added]

As a further enhancement a set of checkboxes showing the value of the special permissions e.g. Create Collections, would be good but might require a more significant re-design of the page and would only be saving a single click. I suggest instead that it might be useful to have an enhanced filter view of users which allows an administrator to view e.g. all users who can Create Collections etc.

In Alteryx Gallery admin, please add a confirmation before applying a change to the default user roles.  Since it can be changed so easily and isn't very clear to what happens when new admins make a change to that drop down.  For example:  They do not realize they changed all the default users to curators!  But they do learn quickly.

Regards,

John Colgan

I would like to be able to see which collection(s) a Workflow is in since in future users will access the majority of workflows via a Collection - so if a user asks me about access to a certain workflow I can find out how they would get access to it i.e. which Collection(s) it was available in and who owns those.

I have a lot of workflows in my Company's private gallery. Many are duplicates. I'm able to pull out a list of all the duplicate workflows with their name and ID. Currently, we can search by name, but even that isn't always accurate. If I just copy and paste a name with underscores, it generally won't be able to find the workflow - I'll need to use parts of the workflow to be able to search for it. Secondly, if I narrow down to the duplicates in the search, I can't tell which one is which. Being able to search by the ID would be an easy way to find the workflow immediately without worrying if the search will be able to accurately find the workflow name. I've posted a screenshot below of me searching for an App ID that ideally would be able to pull up the workflow I need.

With a majority of our Alteryx users working via VPN, our Firewall systems are detecting a brute force attack if a user tries to open another Alteryx tab within 60 seconds.  We would like to request to reduce the amount of authentications attempts on the Alteryx Gallery site when launched, so there isn't 100+ 401 unauthorized errors to trigger the Firewall system to disconnect the session.

I thought that in our previous version of Gallery (2018.3) the list of available data connections in the Admin page of the same name used to fill the entire depth of my browser window?

In 2020.4 in uses only about half the depth and presents a scroll bar to view the additional records whilst there is additional white space unused at the bottom of the window.

I suggest that this changed to make full use of the available browser window space.

I note that the data connections page uses a scrolling list as opposed to the paged list which is used in most other pages in the UI. However I would be resistant to changing this as a solution since with the scroll bar view any sorting applies to the entire list as opposed to the current displayed page (c.f. Users)

Without a doubt, Schedule Forecast is a great feature. I feel Schedule Forecast feature should be enabled for Artisans as well who usually create new schedules on Alteryx Server. Artisans can look up the existing schedule details at a specific time and decide if it is best time for their workflow to run. It will be counter productive otherwise in my opinion as curators have to inform the artisan to move their schedule to some other time as there are several other workflows running at the exact time and impact execution time.