Alteryx Server Ideas

So - one of the biggest challenges that we have with the MongoDB used by Alteryx Server is that we continually have issues with locking (where our admins have to go in and undo locks)

Additionally - the current implementation of MongoDB connectivity does not support full Kerberos authentication which means that we're on a non-compliant install (which in a large enterprise is an uncomfortable place).

Given that a very large amount of what the server does is transactional - it would make sense to have an option to use a large-scale SQL server instead of using Mongo.   For large enterprise customers, there must be flexibility to allow the databases that they have large supported instances of (my strong preference would be MS SQL 2016).

MS SQL natively supports XML so all the canvasses can be stored in native format.   Additionally, MS SQL allows very fast query across XML, and given the clustering and reporting capabilities in MS SQL, this would dramatically increase our ability to self-manage our infra.

Given that Alteryx is looking more and more at large Enterprise customers - a move to a large-scale clustered SQL env as the back-end would be a very positive move.

NOTE: as we consider DB options for a SQL backend - please consider your large-scale enterprise customers.   For example - MS SQL or Oracle or DB2 are all much more prevalent in enterprises than databases like Postgres - so it's important to focus on the enterprise support for the DB that you choose.

+ @Deeksha @avinashbonu @revathi @BenBu

It would be useful if the Admin of a Private Gallery (in house server) could delete studios and/or members.  Also, it's confusing that a member who's added also gets a Studio automatically set up.  Members (for my purposes) are only supposed to be able to run apps in collections that I grant them access to.  They should not get their own studio.  Even if they can't use the studio (or even know that they have a studio), it's not very efficient to have all these studios show up on the subscriptions screen.

As a server administrator, I would like to have more control over collections.  I have a user who is in charge of a collection out of office, and we have some users who need to get to be added to the collection to run workflows.  As admin of the server, I would like to be able to add users to this collection, modify permissions, modify workflows, etc.  This would be necessary both for when users are temporarily out of the office as well as if someone were to leave the company.

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...

The shared data connections from the Gallery have been very helpful in centralizing data connection information between desktop users and their workflows when saved to the Gallery. The In-DB tools currently cannot take advantage of the Gallery Data Connections and require a completely separate setup that is both confusing and adds additional connection management work for creation/password changes. 

It would be a great enhancement to Alteryx if all connections for the different types of tools could be centrally managed from the shared Data Connections manager found in the Gallery.

Best regards,

Ryan

Currently the server diagnostics (http://localhost/gallery/admin/#!diagnostics) covers a narrow time window (from what I can see - only the last few hours)

.... and if you attempt to zoom out or pan to see a broader time window - the graph gets smaller, but the data does not grow to fill the remaining space

Please could we request 2 changes:

a) add a time axis on the bottom of this chart so that the user can understand the time dimension 

b) Increase the time available for analytics to an arbitrarily broad set of data (which the admin can configure as a server setup parameter - retention period).   For us - we'd want to keep at least 3 months of data, and be able to view this analytically.

Thank you 

Sean

I love the gallery data connection feature - we're going through some big systems architecture changes, resulting in new locations for many datasets. Having a single place in the Gallery Admin area to update connection information works beautifully.

We're running into issues with the gallery-hosted data connections when trying to run some apps on our private gallery though. The trouble comes up when the gallery-hosted data connection appears inside a macro that's part of an app. We get an "Unable to translate alias" error when trying to run these types of apps.

If we have an app using gallery-hosted data connections that are outside of a macro, the gallery is able to resolve the connection alias fine and work properly. The issue only appears when the gallery data connection is part of a macro used inside an app.

We use macros a lot in our app development because it allows us to use standard methods for accomplishing common tasks. Using macros also enables us to set up automated testing workflows to make sure our processes produce expected results. As it is, we're unable to take full advantage of the gallery-hosted data connections because they don't work within macros, and instead have to continue using hardcoded connection strings. These are a bigger maintenance burden as our underlying systems evolve and are updated.

Now, gallery does not support AD group , need to setup user one by one.

If gallery support AD group synchronization, it is more convenient for gallery admin to manage large number of users.

By assigning AD users to AD group, it will reduce the maintenance task of gallery admin, since gallery admin don't need to grant rights in the gallery directly. 

The Save to Gallery window does not resize. When I try to Save my Workflow to my Gallery and Manage Workflow assets, I can not widen that window to see the full path to my assets.

This makes it very hard when you have many assets to know if they need to be included or not with the promotion. It may take two or three attempts guessing what asset is what to get the correct combination to make my App run correctly.

It would be nice to be able to widen this window much like we can with the Workflow dependencies window.

The only reference I can find to this idea is here : https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Connect-Gallery/Share-Results-in-a-Collection/m-p/231 .  It references that the feature of "sharing workflow results" was "on the Roadmap" in 2014.  I did some searching through the current Ideas page and cannot find anything.  I also reviewed the release notes since Alteryx 10.5 and cannot see that this was added.

A user approached me today with a problem of "Many people need access to the results of this data, and I want everyone to be able to see all the results".  While you could potentially email these results to a specified user set, that would require maintaining both a collection and an email tool in the job, and could potentially cause notification fatigue if users only care when they go to the Alteryx Gallery.  Similarly, results could be saved to a networked location, but that would require a user to go to two locations in order to find this information.

As such, having a toggle that allows users with permission to view a workflow, to also see the results of any/all users, would be huge. 

It would be good to have these table headers sizable, so that it can be expanded to display complete Name (and other fields).

So, .YXI files are great, they allow a much simpler installation process of macros from the Gallery to your local machine and server. 

However one problem; they are not supported to be hosted on the Alteryx Gallery. This means that in order to share .yxi files they have to be hosted on some other drive and then you have to have a workflow in the alteryx gallery which provides users with the download link.

This makes that clean process a bit less clean, and it also causes problems with big customers who cannot whitelist these share drives for which the .yxi files are hosted. I myself have had about 20 emails from one global consulting firm in the US requesting access to a macro, I can't link them to the content as they are blocked, and therefor I have to email them individually. 

It's a tad tedious and ruins the 'install experience'.

If you don't know what I'm talking about you can follow my colleagues (Peter Gamble-Beresfords) blog here:

https://www.theinformationlab.co.uk/2017/10/05/create-share-alteryx-tool-installer-yxi-file/

What I'm asking for is simple, support for .yxi files in the Alteryx gallery, in the same way you do with macros.

Ben

When we create a shared macro on the Gallery, the desire is that we are able to:

- publish this down to users simply and seamlessly

- Allow them to use these assets in their canvasses

- Allow them to simply update to the latest version of the asset on an existing canvas.

Unfortunately - right now the only way to distribute shared macros is to create a shared folder; and the only way to manage version upgrades of a shared macro is to manually find every single usage and manually upgrade.

It would be helpful to have a central Logging tool for large & complex environments.

This would be useful to allow teams to have a central way of logging data transformation errors by error-type; severity; alteryx Canvas; etc.

Right now, there's a message tool, but this doesn't provide a way to create well structured central logging across a team; especially once deployed to a server environment.

CC: @rijuthav @jithinmony @HengHe @RajK @ydmuley @revathi @Deeksha @MPistone @Ari_Fuller @Arianna_Fuller @JoshKushner @samnelson @avinashbonu @Sunder_Sriram @Rahul_Thakur @Rahul_Singh

Today, if I want to save a job onto the Alteryx Gallery, I need full permissions to do so and it is a manual process.  For some organizations, this level of access is deemed excessive, which can make properly leveraging the Alteryx Gallery difficult.  Having the ability to write a "deployment" script that could publish a workflow to the Gallery, and potentially add a new workflow to a Collection would be incredibly helpful in these cases.

Currently, if you want to change from Built-in to Windows Authentication, you have to:

To switch authentication types, you'll need to start from scratch.


1. Stop the AlteryxService
2. Open a Windows Folder Explorer and go to the directory you have MongoDB loaded (System Settings->Controller->Persistence->Data Folder
3. Rename or delete that folder (a simple backup would be to rename the folder, you can move it to another directory as well)
4. Open the Alteryx Server System Settings and click next to Gallery->General.
5. Select the new Authentication process you would like to use.
6. Finish the System Settings and the new database will be created.

The Gallery and Scheduler databases are closely tied.  Workflows that are uploaded, results created, and schedules created from the Gallery are stored in the Scheduler database.  So you will need to start from scratch on both the Gallery and in the Scheduler.

This is a non-starter for any company that has any amount of time invested in establishing the use of the Gallery.   Starting over is not an option, but improving security, streamlining access protocols as a part of overall data governance is a must.  Please consider fixing the authentication protocol to make it so we don't have to start over.

Thank you,

Big time user of the Gallery API. In fact, I wrote an R package for it (shameless plug: https://cran.r-project.org/package=alterryx).

It is great that you can queue a job for an application using the Gallery API but it would be great if I could also cancel a running job.

At some point we would like Alteryx Gallery to support SSO via SAML and Authorization via AD groups. The way I want is to have Authentication via SAML and Authorization via AD groups. For instance one of our apps Tableau: It does authentication via SAML (SSO) and for authorization, we import AD groups into Tableau thrice a day(stores the groups in a .xml file), once the groups are in the Tableau, we secure the objects within Tableau using that LDAP groups (which kind of become local groups after import). Basically the userid after the successful authentication step is used by the app for authorization.

I just stated Tableau as one of the ways to implement Authentication and Authorization for an enterprise app. If Alteryx Gallery needs to be an enterprise app, you will need to look into this idea. 

Thanks
Raj