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Alteryx Server Ideas

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I am noticing what I think it's a big gap in terms of turnover and job changes.  Even though you can add workflows to a Collection for development and update purposes. Only the original owner/publisher can see the version history for a workflow. At least that appears to be the case in 2020.1

 

Is there any discussion for the road map to include a way to transfer the ownership of a workflow from one user to another? this would alleviate the need to publish a brand new version and then reset all the scheduling. 

I've seen various solutions/workarounds but this seems to be a table-stakes ask?  When scheduling a workflow I should be able to specify which parameter values to run with.  Just two of many use case examples - 

Use case #1 - a single analytic app could be scheduled multiple times, each schedule specifying a different line of business

Use case #2 - credentials, allow the user to schedule a workflow with their saved credentials.  When their credentials change all they would have to do is update the schedule parameters

 

(If you know a better way I'm all ears, not the API thought that isn't a bad way to do it, just not super Easy)

6-25-2020 5-39-35 PM.png

I would like to see the enhancement of being able to schedule a start and stop time for specific jobs that need to run multiple times per day, so they don't run during the nightly backup periods of the Alteryx server. This can cause the daily backups of the Alteryx Gallery to fail. Currently SQL Server Management Studio/SQL Server has the function to able to schedule start and stop times for specific job. Currently Scheduler page on Alteryx Gallery/Server lacks this feature.

 

SQL Server Management Studio

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Schedules on Alteryx Gallery/Server

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Situation:

As your analytics work grows - you find yourself using the power of Alteryx to create shared macros.    These act as an accelerator for a team because one team member can us a reusable solution created by another team member.   For example - many teams need to get data out of JIRA (or some other system) so you create a connector that everyone can use.

 

That's going well - and now you have 20 teams all publishing canvasses to your server (possibly 100s of canvasses running in production) which make use of your JIRA connector - all good so-far!

 

Problem:

BUT THEN - you discover an issue with the JIRA connector and you need to fix it and publish a new version!

 

It's at this point that you realise that the canvasses on your server which use your JIRA connector are NOT pointing to it, but they have made a copy and included this inside their canvas.   So when you fix the problem with the JIRA connector - no-one gets the fix!

 

This is because every application uploaded to the server is a yxzp file, which zips up a COPY of all the shared macros and uses this in an isolated way.

So - in order to get the new JIRA connector (with the defect repaired) used instead of the old one you now need to:

- Download EVERY canvas on your server

- Unpack them all to expose the sub-macros being used

- Inspect them to see if they are actually an instance of the JIRA Macro

- Make a list of the owner and application IDs

- reach out by e-mail or phone to every one of these folk to ask them to republish their Alteryx workflow with your new version of the JIRA connector.

 

 

Proposal:

Please can we revisit this - we really do need the power of shared macros - and we also need the ability to fix and manage these like a product over time.   This will have an impact on the engine (hence copying @AdamR_AYX ) 

 

Desired end-state:

- When you build a canvas using a shared macro - it doesn't store the macro itself, but rather a reference to the version on the server - unless you explicitly decide to break the connection and take a copy.

- When you check this canvas into the server - your application / yxzp does NOT include a copy of the shared macro - instead it has a reference link

- this means that Alteryx Server can now track which canvasses use this shared macro very simply

- When I fix this shared macro - I can then do an in-place update; or if the interface is not the same (i.e. different inputs or outputs) then this has to be a new version and the users will stay pointing to version 1.

 

This is how shared assets are managed in a micro-service world, which is the way that all of our architecture is going - and it seems important that we build this thinking into the Alteryx infrastructure too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

@AdamR_AYX ; @Treyson ; @SteveA @DerekK ; @BlytheE 

There is no good way to get server user credentials into a workflow without asking them for it in an App interface.  It would be great if we could have a built in Constant that could be used to silently pass user credentials into a workflow for things like API's or logging user information.

Wanted to grab some attention here regarding the Alteryx gallery search engine (which also bleeds over into searching for schedules and jobs when troubleshooting). 

 

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I'm pasting two pictures (one attachment) of searching our gallery for the word "Contour" and the word "Signal". Both of these words are in the title of a single workflow - when I search for the word "Contour", the workflow pops up. When I use the first word in the workflow, which is "Signal", it doesn't pop up. 

 

I appreciate all that Alteryx does, but I wouldn't think this should be a difficult issue to fix, and I would imagine there are other frustrations with the functionality here. 

I have three team members all in the same private studio. We can see each others' workflows. However, when looking at a workflow that another team member has published to the gallery, it looks like:

  1. The workflow has never been run
  2. The workflow is not scheduled to run

This is a massive impediment to collaboration because my team handles ETL for most of the company. If a user complains that their data isn't up to date, whoever receives that support ticket needs to be able to see if the workflow is actually running and whether it was successful or had an error during the last run.

Preventing a team from seeing this for each others' workflow schedules and results means that the only person who can deal with an issue is the person who originally made the workflow. Which makes the idea of a shared private studio wholly pointless as we may as well be operating in different universes.

 

Please create a studio-level setting where all members of a studio can see all schedules and results of all workflows in that studio.

As the Server Admin I'd like to have the ability to view ALL "Workflow Results" for all Subscriptions.This will give the highest level admin the ability to monitor all schedules (on the entire server instance) and monitor if they are unable to complete successfully (example- unable to allocate memory) and any other errors are occurring. 

 

Knowing this information will help the server administrator understand if there are issues with the server itself (e.g. if we need more workers or to simply adjust actual server system settings..etc..)

 

 

 

 

We have several clients that operate in a Multi-Forest environment due to mergers and acquisitions.  Currently with Alteryx Server the only option we can offer them is to use Built-In authentication.  A lot of corporate and particularly finance institutions prefer a single sign on approach and utilise Windows authentication to do this.

 

Would it be possible to add support for Multi-Forest organisations into Server to support organisations going through mergers and acquisitions?

 

This would really benefit us in selling Server in to organisations with complex structures and reduce friction in publishing or preparing workflows.

2019.4+ Server now prompts users to select an Encoding Type when downloading a csv on the gallery. Unfortunately there is no way to disable the prompt of which encoding option to utilize or an ability to select a system default. Please provide these server options as this is causing confusion across departments. 

 

.csv output.csv output

.yxdb output, csv format.yxdb output, csv format

(many users like the preview provided by yxdb but want excel download)

 

During development in Designer, when the workflow is configured to output to csv it already has the encoding configured, please provide the option to at least default this at output on the gallery:

.csv config.csv config

 

The only alternative at this time is to republish all workbooks configured to output .csv or .yxdb to be .xlsx. This is not ideal.

 

Note: Scheduled jobs are not affected - I tested a scheduled run and csv files were successfully written out to a file share on the server. Content format appears to not be impacted. 

 

Thanks!

When an artisan moves positions (within or external) away from their current responsibilities, their collections and workflows should be able to be transferred via an administrator to another user.

Hi there,

 

On the server product you have the ability to set up timeouts to avoid server resources being hogged by any one canvas.

Currently this setting only applies to scheduled canvasses - however this leaves a gap where users can just run this manually.

 

Please can you extend this setting to also cover manually initiated jobs too?

 

SeanAdams_1-1639433415953.png

 

 

 

 

The ability to select a workflow or app within the Gallery web interface and change its name. This would maintain its historical run data, version control revisions, placement in collections, etc. 

 

Use case: As a workflow or app continues to be developed over time, the name may need a revision to continue reflecting the workflow's function. 

 

Best regards,

Ryan

My team currently uses the API to call a large number of workflows via a Python based scheduler process.  We use this currently by having ~10 users in a single subscription (Private Studio).  

 

All of the Private Studio sites on the Alteryx help state that they are going away in the near future to be replaced by individual studios and Shared Collections.  

 

From our testing, this would kill our processing as we cannot have an API for 1 Private Studio call workflows from a different private studio even if they have access through a shared collection.  

 

Are there plans to adjust the API endpoints in the future to better account for this?

 

Our IT department is looking to move to the Collections based structure now in preparation for the removal of the current Studio setup, so another question is when the structural update is planned to go into effect (which server version should we expect this?) so that we can get ready to account for this or if we can ask them to back off a little.

 

Thanks

Hello,

 

The Analytics team for our company services 9 different lines of business, and it would be helpful to create sub folders within each line of business. It would be helpful to be able to restrict the access for each individual sub folder also. Our team deals with different teams within each line of business, and they may need to have different access due to sensitive content. 

 

Thanks,

 

Erik M

I work at a large organization where Security and Privacy are of utmost importance. The ideology that we need to follow is Least Privilege and Need to Know.

 

We (Curators) do not want all the Artisans to publish workflows to Home Page, either knowingly or unknowingly. We however do want to allow a few power users to publish their work in Home Page, but currently the Gallery does not provide the ability to pick and choose who can share workflows publicly. We are educating users to not share any contents publicly, but as we scale up, it will be difficult to manage and govern this.

 

I'm suggesting to implement a global Yes/No feature that will Enable/Disable Artisans to publish contents in Home Page (just like the way we have for Jobs/Scheduling feature). Further, in Users section, Edit User setting needs to have a Yes/No button that will allow Curators to let certain Artisans place workflows in My Company's Gallery.

 

Organizations that never want any workflow to be shared publicly can disable this feature using global Yes/No button. Organizations (like the one I work at) that want to enable this only for certain Artisans, can set the Global Yes/No to No, and then in Users tab, they can pick and choose the Users that need this functionality (which will override the global default). Finally Organizations that do not really care about this functionality can just set the global setting to Yes.

 

Hoping other organizations find value in this functionality as well. Thanks.

I would like to set a retry count when scheduling a job, and also to specify to duration in between retries, e.g. job fails, but then will retry to run 3 times with a 5 minute wait in between each retry.

 

Also would like a radio button next to all workflow results, so when you get a list of failed jobs you can click all the jobs and then hit rerun.  This should be complimented with select all functionality.  This will prevent me from having to go into each job and rerunning, i.e. save me loadsa clicks! 

As large enterprises continually strengthen security around their system and data assets, we're seeing adoption of products like CyberArk's Enterprise Password Vault (https://www.cyberark.com/products/privileged-account-security-solution/enterprise-password-vault/ )

 

The system is essentially a central repository that secures and automatically rotates passwords for privileged accounts- things like a functional account you would use to run workflows against a certain database or set of systems.

 

It would be great if Alteryx could build both Server (Run As Account) and Designer (for individual database connections) integrations with a tool like that.

When restoring an Alteryx Gallery instance to a second box for test & dev it's highly likely that you don't want all your workflows scheduled from your production instance to run in your secondary instance.

 

However there doesn't currently seem to be a kill switch that you can implement up front to stop your scheduled workflows from running. The only way to disable scheduled workflows in your test gallery is to manually delete them all, which is annoying when you have hundreds.

 

It would be great to have a config flag to disable scheduled workflows before the service is started.

Submitting this idea based on the Case #00361430.
 

We are trying to do alteryx workflow chaining based on workflows available in alteryx gallery, but this option is not currently available in alteryx right now and we are raising this idea to enable this feature in upcoming release or existing version patches.

 

Currently couple of methods available; saving the workflow in network share drive and chain the alteryx workflow based on events or run another analytical app on success.

The disadvantage of these methods are,

 

1. We cannot have version history maintained for the workflows in network share drive.

2. We cannot able to run a specific workflow in chaining as the workflows are packaged together.

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