Alteryx Server Ideas

In the Alteryx Gallery UI, it's possible to set up workflow credentials so that a workflow published to the gallery runs as a specific user.  

Unfortunately when that workflow is run from the Alteryx Gallery API, it appears to only ever run as the Alteryx Server Run-As account. 

Our developers in working with this figured out that if they called the (undocumented) API that runs the actual Alteryx Gallery directly, they can achieve what they want, but it seems a risky strategy.

The idea would be:

-Either unify the APIs so that the Gallery itself uses the same API to run workflows as what you present as the "Gallery API" (the eat your own dogfood way)

-Alter the Gallery API to enable us to run as a different workflow credential

Without this, we're forced to permission the run-as account to access anything that uses this method, which in turn then becomes a bit of a security hole (any workflow run will have access to everything that the run-as account uses) 

Hey Alteryx Dev Gurus - 

I've got a situation wherein the user runs something in Gallery, and complains.  I have to log in as that user to view the output files that came back out.  As a super user, I should be able to have all seeing ability!  Thanks!

brian

Hey there,

Below you can see few of my suggestion to improve Alteryx Server. 

Idea for Alteryx Server monitoring:

• Increase data what could be seen on workflow results.
• Possibly create a report with filter option (to filter by user, gallery, workflow and etc.), which would at least contain data like:
  • Successfully ran workflows, count, percentage.
  • Failure rates, counts and etc.
  • Live data for monitoring purposes.
  • etc.
• Possibility to connect to workflow results data (live data) with other tools like Tableau or Power BI to create dashboards and etc. to monitor and act on the error as soon as possible.
• Give a chance for other users to check on the workflow statuses and etc same like workflow owner.

Give server more functionality with:

• Ability for server automatically retry workflow based on configurations: in example:
  • retry flow in specific time (for example in 30 minutes)
  • number of possible retries
  • based on specific workflow (other) results ability to trigger to run another workflow
  • (Maybe there is a better way) ability to run macros which would for example open MS Excel, and run macro inside it. I have some of the workflows where workflow opens excel, runs macro inside, that macro triggers special Add In which connects to Essbase, it pulls the data, saves excel file, and then alteryx continues working with the file. So if such or similar workflows could be run on Server that would be awesome.
  • This is extremely exiting one: possibility to create environment for self-service users, which it would not be something like gallery (because gallery is more suitable for Alteryx Designers/users).
    • in that one environment admin could grant access for user and tick what specific user could see and run.
    • so for admin it would be one environment, and user would see only what is needed for him/her.
    • in that environment user would also be able to schedule self-service workflows to be received in example by email, or BOX drive or any other way. Scheduled workflow would have to be approved by an admin before it would be actually scheduled. 
  • I have not tried this one myself, but that would also be great if all alteryx server environment could be accessed by mobile devices (of course, some features would be limited).

 Hopefully you will find these suggestions interesting and useful. 

Regards,

Aurimas

Currently when running an Alteryx Workflow from the gallery via the API, it doesn't get logged in the user interface in the same way that running it interactively in the gallery GUI does - a shame as it then becomes harder to know the traffic and performance of a workflow run in this way.  

For a given DB connection - there's a need to be able to specify the owner for this specific connection.

Reason for this is that the credentials for a given DB are not all managed by the central admin team - so we'd want to say that a given DB connection is owned by a particular person so that this can be updated frequently as passwords change.

For resilience - our particular policy would be to have 2 owners so that if one person resigns or changes roles, it invalidates the primary and reverts to the secondary - and then asks the new Primary to create a backup owner.

It would be great if i as a developer could create a DB alias connection and for it then to be available to other developers and distributed via the server.

Collaborative working like the above does seem rather limited at the moment.

In larger organizations or organizations with global coverage, it is possible for users to be in different time zones from each other and the Alteryx server. 

WIth our implementation of Alteryx server, we have the server time zone set to that of our data warehouse, but this time zone is different than my own by -2 hours. In the case of scheduling a workflow in the future, I normally correct for this by setting the scheule in the time zone of the server and things work alright. 

Problem 1:

It falls apart is when I want to schedule something in the future, but it is within the timespan between my time zone and the server time zone. For example: It is 6PM my time, and 4PM server time. I want to schedule a workflow to run at 5PM server time (7PM my time). When I try to set this up with the Version 10 scheduler built into Alteryx desktop, it overides the date field upon saving to run the following day instead of today as it thinks im trying to schedule the run at a time that has already passed (which it has in my timezone, but not in the server time zone). Upon trying to edit this schedule to reset the date to today, it again reverts upon saving.  

The only way I have found to get around this is to reset the time zone of my computer to match the server time zone, then set the schedule, then reset the time zone of my machine back to local time again. This is not the best experience, and will likely be required more frequently for users as their time zone difference increases. 

Problem 2:

When wanting to run something server side immediately (I do this in cases where the runtime will be long, or im mobile and on a machine with a lower amount of processing resources) the "Once" option can be used in scheduler to push something to server and run it. In my case, due to the timezone difference, the default time set when trying to do this is the current time in my time zone, but 2 hours ahead of the current server time.

I have two proposed resolutions:

1) Transmit Server time zone information to the local scheduler to have everything involving scheduling in Server time. Also for any timestamp fields, include the time zone designation so its clear to the user.

2) Use information from the user's machine and information from the server to do timezone conversions behind the scenes so whenever scheduling or viewing schedules, all timestamps are in local time to the user. I feel this is the prefered solution for the best user experience, but would also be the more complex to implement. 

Thanks,

Ryan

Organizations using Alteryx Server with an embedded MongoDB can benefit from an option to change the MongoDB User and Admin User passwords.

Current deployments of Alteryx Server allow regeneration of the Controller Token, and for many of the same reasons, the ability to change the MongoDB passwords would be beneficial to customers.

Many organizations rely on a centralized team for daily administration of the Alteryx Server and MongoDB. With the current functionality, when members of this team change positions, they continue to know the MongoDB authentication information indefinitely. Providing organizations with this capability allows them to make the determination of how/when a change is required to mitigate any risk of misuse.

Suggested information to be included in audit logs.

A secure audit record of all activities on the system:

1. General user access
2. User creates / modifies / archives / deletes data (ie: history on what the user did)
3. Administrator actions

At minimum the logs should include the following:

1. Unique user identifier
2. Unique data subject identifier
3. Function performed by the users
4. Date/time stamp of what was performed by user

I believe many customers could benefit from this type of audit logging, especially those who are required to obtain specific security certifications for their alteryx deployments.  From what I can see online there does not seem to be out of the box functionality for this. If anyone has implemented any type of audit logging like this please feel free to comment.

Thanks

-Vincent

For large implementations of Alteryx - you'd want to have a live control-center view that allows you to see:

- The state of health of all the server components

- the depth of the queue in the controller

- Jobs failing vs. succeeding.

While this can be done by running alteryx jobs, and by going and looking for problems - what we'd want is to have a heads-up control center view which is self-refreshing all the time so that administrators can be notified when there are issues.    And this should not be e-mail notification (it's too easy to miss an e-mail or an SNMP alert)

Think about a 40 inch monitor on a wall (like in a traffic control center)  that allows the server management team to see the state of health of the plant at a glance, and dive into issues without having to constantly be looking for them.    this is a critical capability for enterprise install-base and would be a very useful capability to add to the platform.

Hello,

I've used a standard configuration to set up an Alteyx server. The gallery is available at https://alteryx.samplecompany.com/gallery

I'd would be really helpful if you enable to create a landing page at https://alteryx.samplecompany.com/ and add a possibility to host add extra pages. The easiest way to do this is to add an option to the Alteryx Server configuration wizard and read the pages from Alteryx workspace location.

Additionally, such landing page should have redirection from HTTP to HTTPs.

Best,

Piotr

Allow LDAP COnfiguration on Alteryx Server ,Right now its only AD ,but LDAP will be for for SSO ,SAML . 

Not sure if this has already been suggested but I couldn't find it in the ideas...

It would be awesome if in the Gallery some better documentation could be created for the naming of the different private studios, collections, and districts. The naming causes some confusion because it is so different than most other products which causes confusion in our company.

Our team is still fairly new to the Gallery, so if there's something existing that I'm missing, I'd be glad to hear it.

I recently found the following thread : http://community.alteryx.com/t5/Publishing-Gallery/Get-App-User-name-at-Run-TIme/m-p/775/highlight/t...

Which included a text box input with a title of "_cloud:UserID".  I was able to use this to pull in things such as the users login information, email address, etc.

I would like to be able to use a function similar to this in order to generate user-specific usage reports, or dynamically update a "Send Email" tool with the email of the running user.

However, when I inquired about this "_cloud:UserID" API call, I was told that it is an undocumented and unsupported call.

Ideally, I'd like an application/macro tool that does something similar - which takes the user's credentials automatically from the gallery and runs the Application based on those credentials.  This could modify Emails or filter the output of the Workflow.  I'm sure there are other use cases as well.  I think having an officially supported tool to manage this would allow for a wide variety of dynamic applications on the gallery.

One needs to obtain a designer license in order to have a server license.

It may be a good idea to package those two don't you think, and now it's ok to install designer on a Server OS.

It would be awesome if you automatically have a virtual desktop environment to connect to...when you get a server license,

The following is a slide from Inspire 2016 and the client's are already doing this

1. For keeping the running workflows unaffected by docking undocking workstations

2. It also increases the performance by getting the designer closer to the data

3. It would also be safe to share company analytics capabilities with outsider without giving them direct access to downloadable data etc.

Hi,

 We need a way to figure out at which tool alteryx workflow is currently at (i.e., workflow execution progress log) when the workflow is running on the alteryx server scheduler.

This is very useful especially if you have analytical workflows that take long time to run (say 4-6 hours) and at the moment there is NO WAY to figure out at which stage the execution is at from the scheduler.

We can't open the log file on the server as the workflow is IN PROGRESS (we get the standard The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process) . We can't see the underlying progress log under Scheduler Queue tab either.

It will be useful to capture that information in MongoDB or somewhere so that we can read the In progress log in the real time..

 Thanks,

Sandeep.

The mongo db back is a working process but I would like to replace individual workflows and not the entire server state.

Wondering if there are any plans to change the RC4 encryption on alteryx server to something stronger (eg: AES, Blowfish etc)

Would be curious to see if anyone else in financial services has this challenge from a security perspective.

Adrian