Alteryx Server Ideas

Hi all,

In an enterprise environment - DB connections need to be set up from the server and pushed down to your users; and they need to be managed across the various servers in your software lifecycle.

In other words - you may have a sandpit / dev server env; a UAT env; a pre-prod; and a prod env - and each of these need to have the same DCM credential IDs so that users can access these.     

(before you say "you can do this from the desktop) - that is true, however that's not a workable solution in an enterprise env because that means that users can change the password from their desktop into a prod env which is a breach of IT General Controls)

The solution here is to break DCM out in to a separate service - where

- all your servers (dev; UAT; Pre-Prod; Prod) can all point to one instance of DCM

- users can maintain their own connections and credentials

        - Each needs to have up to 2 owners so that you can deal with people moving jobs / leaving the firm

- users can also entitle these connections and credentials to their team members so that when the team member logs in, it shows a popup saying "you've just been given access to new credentials / connections"

- A particular connection may have multiple different variants - depending on the environment.

        - HR Data may point to a UAT version of HR data if you're on the UAT server; and to Prod if you're on the Prod server

        - if a connection is environment specific - then it also needs to have segregated credentials (since the login to your UAT HR Data may not be the same as prod).

Thank you all

sean

cc: @wesley-siu @_PavelP 

Given the security requirements of our company collections need to be created centrally, which is fine for sub-organizations that only require one collection. However, the large sub-orgs require more than 1 collection, ideally we would create the top-level collection and give the sub-org the access to create their own sub-collection within that collection, but not the ability to create collections at the top-level.

In an enterprise multi-node Alteryx Server deployment that has existed for many years and many upgrades, there are artifacts within the MongoDB that are unknown to Gallery Administrators. I envision a workflow or app that is developed by Alteryx that queries the MongoDB and looks for orphaned documents in the MongoDB across all collections. With 2022.3 there is a pre-upgrade check, however, it does not find all unexpected items within the MongoDB. Regular ongoing MongoDB health helps with overall management of the environment and could prompt for support cases before it becomes a problem during pre-upgrade activities.

Idea: Option to receive an email notification when a schedule gets disabled (could be added in the user settings, see attached picture)

Business Impact: The implementation of this idea would reduce delays that might even have a financial impact because

not receiving any notifications when a schedule was disabled could lead to

• important processes not being executed and users realizing that only at a later point in time (>> potential financial impact and stress)
• the user not being able deliver a report in time (>> potential financial impact)
• huge effort to manually track the workflow results on the server (or email notifications after a successfull run) to avoid the above two bullet points (>> financial impact due to waste of time)

I would be glad if you could implement this idea because I think it would be useful for a lot of people!

When you add a workflow you have to add its schedule to share the results in collection menber's.
A workflow can be in several collections and therefore different users can schedule it. (why not)
This results in multiple schedules for the same workflow. There is no reason why a workflow cannot have multiple schedules.(mandatory in some cases)

Automatically adding schedules to the collection would allow users to see that there is already a schedule on the workflows in question and not to recreate one!

it should also be possible to create a schedule from the collection.

Hello all,

According to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webhook

"A webhook in web development is a method of augmenting or altering the behavior of a web page or web application with custom callbacks. These callbacks may be maintained, modified, and managed by third-party users and developers who may not necessarily be affiliated with the originating website or application. "

An example : whoever publishes an asset, I receive a notification on Teams and when a scheduling task fails, it creates automatically an analysis task on Trello.

Seems cool, huh?

Guys at Tableau have implemented it (https://help.tableau.com/current/developer/webhooks/en-us/ ) and so do the guys for Qlik Cloud.

Best regards,

Simon

Enhancement for the ability to trap errors at the tool level, take actions, and direct workflows based on error messages. If a tool presents an error, check for additional handling instruction in the configuration panel.

Enhancement request that there is an ability to limit collection naming rights to the collection owner and/or collection admins. Currently anyone with access to a collection can rename it.

Today, when you share a workflow with someone else through the collection, you cannot see the manual run that the person will do, neither the person will see yours. 

This is really annoying as this is not helping collaboration between colleagues. 

Since we use an external scheduler and the server api, only the job owner will see the job execution results within the gallery.

Idea here would be to let the sharing of job execution result as an option in the collection.

Hello all,

Nowadays, chatting, commenting, having a discussion on assets that are published on a server is a very common feature, and a useful one !

Here an example on Tableau :

Collaboration is not a luxury item !

Best regards,

Simon

Hello all,


Alteryx Designer Cloud is quite young, somehow incomplete, not compatible with Alteryx Desktop etc... but I'm very optimistic than in a few years it will become a killing app !

That said, I'm more skeptical on this race to the cloud : from my experience, Cloud should just be one way of selling a product, not the only one. It has a lot of cons and a lot of pros and customers should have the possibility to choose between "on-premise" and "cloud"  product, and change from one to the other very easily.

My main customer on Alteryx is a government agency that deals with highly confidential, personal data. They won't go to cloud. Not in the next ten years. But they would love to have the Alteryx Designer Cloud on their own server.

Best regards,

Simon

When scheduling an analytical app on Gallery, there is no UI for submitting app values. This significantly limits the value of scheduling workflows and using analytical apps. With this feature, it would allow our users to have more flexible scheduling while also simply maintaining one workflow. Because this feature doesn't exist, we have had to build workarounds by either creating multiple workflows or utilizing APIs. 

Since this feature is already available for manual runs and APIS (shown below), it shouldn't be a reach to also have this feature when scheduling a run.

Manual Method:

API Method: GET /workflows/{appId}/questions

Scheduling Method (no app questions): 

Hello

Imagine the dream : Alteryx Designer Cloud with in database tools.

Well, that would be so great I won't write more....

Best regards,

Simon

Sometimes, a workflow posted to the Server is calling from a source data that has dimensions which are specific to certain users based on departments, divisions, countries, regions, states, or etc. depending on the level of granularity. 

Although Alteryx developers can create Analytical Apps that have the option for end users to select these dimensions, a more seamless experience for end users (and better for security as well) is to have the ability to configure such filters for existing users on the Alteryx Server itself.

So, if Person A belongs to State 1 and Person B belongs to State 2, by default when both Person A & B enter the Server to that specific workflow in a collection or district, they will automatically be filtered for State 1 and 2 respectively. 

This is similar to Section Access configuration - whereby users have already been pre-filtered the moment they enter.

The current workaround is to create multiple workflows and store them in different collections or districts specific to end users, and to make any changes will require a change to the workflow itself. 

It will be great to have a dashboard that allows for Alteryx Server admins to configure on their own without hassle.

We want to share direct links to analytics apps with our users.  However this does not work with our current SAML login.   This the use case.  

1. User clicks on direct link URL for the app  

2. User  is required to click log-in button

3. After login user is taking to the gallery home page not to the app

The end effect is that we cannot share links to apps with our casual users, instead we have to instruct them to go to the gallery log in and then search all public workflows for the specific app they are looking for.   Not a great user experience, especially because we did not have this issue before single sign on support. 

personally I think this is bug more than a feature request, but was asked to create it as a request by support 

Today, when you trigger a job using the Server API, it is considered as a manual run type. In fact there are only 2 type of jobs : "Scheduled" and "Alteryx_Run"

I think "Alteryx_Run" should be segregated into "API_Run" and "Manual_Run". This way in future version we could treat those type of job differently. 

We could also have more stats around the type of jobs.

Hello,

We would like to have the option to configure the timeout of the manual running jobs, as already exists for the schedule jobs.

Regards

API that allows to specify the workflow version to download.

I'd like to request the ability for the Curators to change the priority on Apps in the Gallery.

Today we have a system where users are not allowed to set the priority on workflows. The Curators change the priority of scheduled workflows based on workflow runtime/ business need by going to Gallery Admin> Jobs> Scheduled Workflows, and then editing the schedule priority.

The problem that that we have a numbers of Gallery Members/ Viewers that run Apps through the day that are very fast to run, but depending on how big is the queue they can several minutes/ hour until a spot is free to run.

If would be very helpful to get a better UX if the curator can choose which apps should have a higher priority to run.

Thanks,

Mauricio Estevez