Alteryx Server Ideas

As we continue to build Alteryx Workflows for the business, there is a continued need for an organizational structure for saving and storing Alteryx Workflows within the Alteryx Gallery. Organizing the workflow repository through a "folder hierarchy" will allow users to quickly navigate and find the appropriate workflow. Currently, the workflows are listed in alphabetical order and requires the user to remember the Alteryx Workflow name and click to the proper page. 

Any enhancements to the Alteryx Gallery organization structure would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you, 

KK

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.

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

Hi,

I have described my issue in the Community post here:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Connect-Gallery/Version-Management-in-Gallery/m-p/120319#M3...

Is there a way to retrieve an exact date when new version of a workflow was uploaded to Gallery? I know it works when it is today, yesterday or couple days ago but after that you can only see "2 months ago" etc. in Creation Date, which is not sufficient for any version management.

Thank you

Alteryx Server does a pretty good job of tracking all the information you need in order to find out who ran a workflow at a given time, even if that workflow has been deleted from the Gallery.

However, if I need to identify what that workflow actually did on a specific date, and that version is no longer available on the Gallery, it gets really hard to track down.

There are some posts throughout the community on leveraging the MongoDB to try and reconstruct this, but in some cases the workflow is "Chunked" and becomes impossible for an end user to reconstruct.

I spoke to support about this recently and they suggested that by using the Scheduler, I could schedule the historical instance of the workflow and then "Really quickly" grab it when it was reconstructed from the temporary staging folder used by our Alteryx Server.  This has a few concerns, among them, finding a way to run this workflow so that the files can be created but it has no impact on tables, for instance if the given workflow drops a table as part of its execution.  Additionally, the only way to schedule with a different set of permissions in a 1-Worker environment is to change the default "Run Workflows As" to a different user, who also needs permission to access all files on the Alteryx Server.  This can also impact any other Scheduled or Gallery job that is executed while this recovery is underway, effectively causing downtime to do file recovery.

These restrictions are specific enough as to be impractical for most organizations using Alteryx Gallery/Server.

I think this could be solved by adding to the Scheduler an option along the lines of "Download a copy of the workflow", available to administrators. Ideally this copy could include some important metadata, like when that version of the workflow was uploaded, who uploaded it, and its ID/Version Number from the Gallery.

This would go a long way towards making it easier to Audit and respond to requests for historical information about Alteryx Workflows on the Server, and since the Alteryx Engine can already recreate these workflows, I think that a basic version of this feature could simply save out that temporary file, rather than executing it.

On the workflow results window, I'd like to see a column for "Start Time". If I have a workflow that is running, I'd like to know what time it started running so I have an idea on when it might finish.

We have the need to bulk-add users, and to bring in their information (full name; location; etc) from Active directory.

Right now, adding users is a 1:1 process which is highly painful.

Desire is to be able to take a list of Kerberos IDs, and bulk add them as users - and then select a group of them and permission either for the gallery; or for designer licenses.

cc: @revathi @avinashbonu @Deeksha

Hello Alteryx Devs - 

So, I'm poking around the Atlerxy Gallery API stuff with an eye toward building a set of classes that can interact with workflows without exposing Gallery proper to the community at large.  That being said, I was a little dismayed to find that all interactions require inclusion of *user specific* API Keys and Secrets.  It can be dealt with, but ultimately it means that configuring a middleware tier between the real world and Alteryx server requires an additional hierarchical level; i.e., understanding which of the developers came up with workflow X and having *their* API Key / Secret attached at configuration time.  

Anyways, it might be easier to just have a global trusted key / (super) secret.  If you get that, you can execute a workflow.  

Maybe we have a special studio that people could clone to, and in this way, you'd only have to track a single key/secret outside.  

I mean, the existing system works OK for one offs, but if you wanted to have a (semi) modular system in place, dependence on understanding publishing entity specifics seems to muck things up for no discernible benefit.  Of course, maybe in some places there is benefit to this scheme (?), but it is causing me to craft some weird work arounds early in development, which gives me a sinking feeling.

Or am I doing it wrong? 

Thanks for listening. 

brian

Although the connectivity to the eMail infrastructure is set up on the controller and worker nodes - there is no ability to set up automated alerting for errors on workflows from the server.

We would like to be able to set up the gallery as follows:

- Every job is owned by a user or a distribution list

- If that workflow throws an error or warning (this should be configurable on the server, whether warnings are included), then the author should be e-mailed with a link to the specific workflow and the error log.

This can be done in a round-about way, by running an error-reporting alteryx job after the fact - but this kind of alert needs to go out almost immediately given our dependance on Alteryx for specific SLAs.

cc: @avinashbonu ; @Deeksha ; @revathi

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

I think it would be a great feature to include the performance tuning logs as an optional output in Alteryx Server. 

 - This would allow me the ability to leave performance logging turned on, so I could see what was happening during an automated scheduled run of the workflow. 

Performance Log :   <Link> (or attachment)

I would also like to see a tool (or tools) as optional outputs such as:

File(s) Generated:  

    <List of Files:    <Link to Files>    <Size of File>

These type of outputs would be greatly beneficial options instead of "This Workflow produced No Output"

Thanks for reading

Randy

We spent almost a full day on Friday internally, and also about 3 or 4 hours of time for 3 Alteryx Server engineers (thank you all - MattH; ZachH; WayeW) and Ben Burkholder trying to get our gallery server to start.

Error message was "

Failed to construct Gallery daemon process, process exited code <9002>

This was all that was provided in the server log files; the gallery log files; and the Windows Event Viewer.

In the end, it turned out that the issue was very simple - the MongoDB had open locks in place that needed to be deleted; and then the service came up immediately.

Several man-days of our effort; as well as the precious time of the Alteryx Engineers who gave up their Friday afternoon to help could have all been avoided if the error-message on the server failure said "Login failure on server due to open locks - please clean out locks on db.locks collection" with a link to the solution or a lookup code that be researched on the Alteryx support site.     

Please could we go through the server service and eliminate all the exit codes and replace with human-friendly error messages - that way we could allow this kind of issue to be self-diagnosed, and allow the Alteryx Engineers to spend their time building the next generation of Alteryx Server rather than diagnosing a table lock.

cc: @avinashbonu @revathi @Deeksha @BenBu @WayneWooldridge @MattH @SteveA @ZachH 

Hi there,

Please can we extend the support for MongoDB to include MongoDB Enterprise latest versions, and certify at latest version within 3 months of release (both with the connector components, and the server infra)?

Given the deep dependence that Alteryx server has on MongoDB, being current with the latest version is critical (since many enterprises have a policy of moving to the latest version within 6 months, and shutting off old after 12.

https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/release-notes/3.4/

https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/release-notes/3.2/

Mongo 3.2 has been out since Sept 2015, and my understanding is that Alteryx Server is not yet certified for 3.2 - so it may be worth skipping to 3.4 (released 11 Sept 2017).

Many thanks

Sean

I know that the documentation shows that you can setup a worker to a specific QoS so that it will only pick up work for a particular workflow or app, but there could be a greater use for it.

For example if the Admin could control what QoS means for each definition.

I.E. Application, vs a workflow that runs over an hour, vs in-database tools. Then it will allow the admins to self guide where the work is going.

Right now there is only three levels

• Normal workflow execution: QOS = 0
• Chained application execution: QOS = 4 (all apps in the chain aside from the last)
• Workflow validation requests: QOS = 6

This was great for Alteryx public, but for private Galleries we need to distribute the work better than FIFO.

I have my  component set to email me if it errors, which is great.  But then when it does bork, I get a 6M email that is impossible to scroll through on a mobile device.  Maybe give an option to only email the error line / tool identifier so you have a better idea of what happened, but don't get war and peace as told by info logging.  

Alteryx Server seems to natively support MicrosoftSQL and Oracle connections on Alteryx Server. It would be helpful to natively support (i.e., a non-ODBC connection) for Cloudera Hadoop as well.

Please support SAML 2.0 for gallery