Alteryx Server Ideas

I'm really loving the new data connections for 11.0. We have deployed them in a private gallery for our users and it's great. The only drawback is that the server itself cannot easily be configured to use these same credentials. I would like some way for the service account running our jobs on our server to use the data connections from the gallery. I can assign the credentials to that service account just fine, but it never picks them up since it never open up the Alteryx GUI when it's running jobs. This would allow us to have one spot with all of the credentials. Currently, we're going to have 2 locations with all of our credentials that we'll have to make sure stays in sync: 1 in the gallery for the users, and 1 on the sever box for the server.

Thanks!

In any large IT environment - you will have multiple systems which each use different nomenclature to describe the same thing

This relates to products; currencies; customers; suppliers; trade types; etc.

At present - our users are bridging this gap either by:

a) creating a bunch of excel spreadsheets with "Magic Code Translation Tables" - which is unfortunate because these become unmaintainable very quickly and live on people's desktops (and are not reusable assets) or

b) creating a whole morass of one-way-translation tables to translate from each input source to the normalized format - these are all hand-rolled translation tables; with hand-rolled ways of adding translations etc.

What would be very useful is to allow Alteryx users to specify these kinds of domain concepts on the Alteryx server, with a flexible way of adding synonyms.  For example - our master customer list is kept on the server with a master customer ID (call it MID for Master).   If I'm dealing with a new system that uses a different customer ID (call it NsID for New SystemID), then I can map the NsID to the MID centrally so that anyone who wants to do analytics on this data can just drag in a converter from NsID to MID; and also drag in the master customer list with the MIDs.

This would allow all these Magic Translation Tables to become an enterprise asset rather than isolated data islands, and act as an accelerator for every other team using this data.

Can we make the ability for a developer using Alteryx Designer and having a workflow using in-DB tools to pass along their credentials with the workflow when scheduling to run on Alteryx Server.  An individual user may have access to only certain tables in Teradata for example and the ODBC connection on Server may not have access to the same tables so we need to be able to pass along the encrypted credentials.  THanks!

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.

Hi,

Currently for most of our workflows we are using our private Alteryx Server to run workflows, using executables that call alteryxenginecmd and output logs to dynamically created log files.  However, there is currently no way to leverage a custom log location for a workflow that is run directly from the Alteryx Gallery (apart from sending an email, which has scalability problems).

I would like an option to create the output log as part of a workflow, so that when we save that workflow to the Gallery, it can output a log with a dynamic name easily.

Because of sensitive nature of data we deal with, all of our infrastructure is located in a restricted area. As a result, our Alteryx server can only be accessed on machines with a corporate-built system connected to corporate network unless the access has been authenticated.

What this means is that while I am on my corporate-built laptop, I can access the Gallery node from anywhere as we use Windows login for authentication. However if I wanted to schedule a workflow while connected to a non-corporate network (eg when working from home) I wouldn’t be able to do it because the controller server can't be accessed - it uses http protocol without authentication.

Currently there's no workaround and the situation creates number of challenges for colleagues using the scheduler. It would be great it it was possible to use DirectAccess or alternative way of identifying that the connection is coming from a corporate client.

While Alteryx is a self-service tool for the business there is a need for administrators to get a little more insight to the usage of the installation on the server. Each customer is forced to create their own monitoring tools. I understand NewRelic and Cloudwatch can easily be used but there is a need to split the admin view by organization departments since each dept needs their own resource utilization and workflow report. Logical split view reporting should be facilitated by the Alteryx server product.

I was reading a post on the Community (http://community.alteryx.com/t5/Publishing-Gallery/Macro-sharing-Best-practice/m-p/38330) which reminded me of an idea that I had.

It would be really nice if a Gallery location could be used as a "Macro Search Path" so that macros don't need to be downloaded from the Gallery and saved locally to be used in a workflow.

So in addition to going to Options>User Settings>Edit User Settings>Macros and adding a local/network path, you could add your internal gallery information...

It would be great for Alteryx to provide the UI to allow the user to maintain the data on the target table through Alteryx. The workflow application would be a standard way to maintain reference data.

This would allow us to deliver a quick way to interface with relational tables. Something similar to the following projects:

- django admin site

- phpgrid

- etc.

This would avoid using Microsoft Access for example for quick table edits and using the simplified Alteryx app instead

We get a lot of comparisons with DataStage ETL and what Alteryx can do. DataStage has the capability to partition queries and run on multiple worker nodes to allow the execution to be more efficient and faster than if it ran on one worker. We want similar capability on Alteryx as our case study shows right now that Alteryx is 10X slower than a query ran on DataStage through the GRID.

Hello Community:

I was looking in the notifications part of the Gallery Admin and saw a glaring ommission: The validation email was something about a code, but nothing about a workflow. "What?!" I interrogo-banged.Where is "Email when workflow is complete?"

I would like to move that Gallery include an option (at the workflow level and globally within a studio (perhaps beyond, I'm a newb to Gallery)) that a user can subscribe to an email notification if the workflow completes (or errors out). 

Where I'm currently working, we have some workflows that take, literally, in the twenty-plus hour range. Instead of having to check when it is complete, it would be really nice to get an email from Gallery saying: "Hi guys! [Workflow X] is done! YAY!"

I realise there's an email tool in the rendering, but that is... shall we say, complicated. In this case, we're using an R-tool, so all the downstream tools are blind to the metadata. Filtering records down to one so that only one email is sent at the end of the chain is... challenging (remember that 20-hour thing? Try developing on a 20+ hour cycle. It's like 1970 up in here!). And totally counterintuitive. I also feel new users will have issues configuring an email tool; it took me 3 months to get ours to work and it only works from our server. Plus, it's a kludgy workaround. 

I feel that this would probably be easy to implement and fits the sensibilities of Gallery. 

Vote this up, folks!

Cheers,

Cedric

When you create an App/Macro locally and give it a custom icon, that icon should follow the App/Macro when you load it into the Gallery.

It would be nice to have an inbuilt function(s) that return an identifier (NTLogin for instance when the gallery is setup with windows auth) of the user running the app on the gallery.

Functions like - USERNAME(), DOMAINNAME() etc., helps.

I know that it can be achieved via the "__cloud:UserId" call , which is not officially supported by alteryx. It adds value if it is inbuilt within the product itself.

Regards,

Sandeep.

Currently the only filtering available in the Results tab in View Schedules is by Workflow Name. It would be nice to be able to filter by Status, so we can just look for potential problems, like warnings or errors. Currently, I have a job that runs every 5 minutes. That means I have to scroll through hundreds of rows, or about 12 pages using the default 25 rows per page, just to scan for potential problems in the last 24 hours.

How about adding a CAPTCHA option for Alteryx Server?

That will block bruteforce attacks, bruteforce to crack or bruteforce to lock...

Alteryx has the power (no pun intended), and Power BI has the visualizations.

But, why use two interfaces when you could use one?

A concept we started kicking around was embedding a PowerBI.com visualization into the Alteryx Gallery.

In theory this should work, but we're interested to hear if anyone else has tried it or has a best practice for embedding links into Gallery reports.

It should be possible to take the dashboard link:

Then, drop that into a text input tool to have it embedded in the output.

The idea is that certain dashboards would be linked to certain report results to allow an end user to drill into the output of the Gallery report specific to each result output, thus creating an interactive drill down in one interface.

Thoughts?  Ideas?

It would be nice to be able to toggle between the Admin screens and the Gallery screens.  

When sending an app to the Gallery, in the Asset Management window, it would be nice to have a "check all" and "check none" box.  

In the Private Server settings, you can "Run As", but it is all or nothing -- anything on Scheduler will "Run As" the user coded (or you can leave it as the default which is the machine).  It would be helpful if functionality existed like the Gallery - where you can dictate "Run As" for each individual module.