Alteryx Server Ideas

Good Day.

We would like a built-in process that would search or, and resolve, workflows that are stuck in the "initializing" state. These seem to happen for various reasons but communication problems between the controller and workers .. usually a socket timeout.. which appears  to be most problematic. It seems  that these type of errors should be expected in all but the most stable environments,

Currently, the only tool that we have to solve this problem is to restart the Alteryx Service on the controller and while this works there tendency to cause some collateral damage in workflows ...erroring or restarting from their beginning.

There may be a way to solve this without restarting the service by editing Mongo using a tool like Robo 3T but that is unproven and has its own risk.

After dealing with this issue and struggling for quiet some time we think that the best option is to implement a "clean up" DB process that will run every 5 min or so, capture a list of workflows in the "initializing" state , then compare that list to one in the next 5 min cycle and fix any workflows that appear in both lists. We think that returning  any stuck workflows to the queued state would be the best Fix  option.

We just don't want to continue to use Restart the Service process to solve this issue and accept the collateral damage.

Thank you for your consideration

Tom D  

This idea has been touted in different flavours over the years (but not implemented), but I'd like to push it a little further:

1. Create the ability to collaboratively edit an Alteryx workflow - e.g. like you can edit Microsoft documents collaboratively. If the front-end is primarily an XML interface, this should in theory be possible?

2. Version control (not version tracking) - i.e. automatically state the differences in scripts between versions and allow for checking in and checking out of code

3. Power BI & Tableau Prep have the ability to see exactly what changes were made and to reverse steps to get back to a specific stage of development: it would be great to have a panel that tracks all the edits you've made since you started editing the workflow

In simple terms, a modern, interactive way for multiple developers to work together, but also to encourage the use of Server to "check in" your application and to avoid developers saving the same file over & over again locally.

It would be a very pleasing user experience if we could enjoy the Server usage with a true dark mode. The customization in the Theme-Panel isn't advanced enough to do it ourselves - unless we deep dive into the css-files. The CSS already has a good structure and the dark mode could be enable with just a few changes. 

Here is a comparison of my server in light and dark mode.

It's probably noticeable that I haven't studied Design, but it should give a rough suggestion how it could look.

Obviously not everyone wants a dark mode, therefore every user should have toggle in the user settings to switch between light and dark mode.

Allow admins to configure an outage window(s) of a specified amount of time (say 5-6pm every sunday) for conducting admin activities. Specifically this outage window would block any scheduled jobs, drive any manual started jobs to queue, and also issue a popup on the gallery to notify users that it's during an outage window. 

My team utilizes the Gallery API extensively and have found that we have processes that the API has listed as actively running, but cannot be found via the Controller's GUI.  As a gallery artisan, I can call flows via API, but cannot cancel these executions unless I reach out to the administrator group to kill them manually. 

It would be extremely helpful to add an endpoint with the ability to submit a specific job GUID and have the server/controller kill the execution of that flow and clear up the server capacity.  This could then be scheduled on a regular basis as a maintenance  task to keep the server clean.

Thanks

Hey Team,

With 2020.3, the new Groups feature came into light, which is great, but seems like it was only half-thought.

It would have been nicely complemented with some API endpoints that would allow managing the groups' members - add, remove, list members, etc.

Seems like the API on Alteryx is like 100 steps behind and seems like the new developments are not considering adding APIs for the new released features. I feel this is a product roadmap issue.

As an admin, I would like far more ways to automate managing the Server/Gallery than the ones currently provided by Alteryx.

Integration with AD would be nice as well, we use SAML, and would like to have the option to import AD groups that would sync automatically in Alteryx - same way Tableau has those groups that are imported directly from AD.

Thanks,

Alex

Hello,

I was recently hired by a fortune 500 company to eliminate use of their Access DB's by replacing them with Alteryx solutions.  My first step is to understand the old DB's so I know what type of workflow to build.  I'd love to have an ERD tool built in Alteryx to drop right after the input data tool.  The closest I've found is the Network Analysis tool, but I don't see that giving me the desired output.  

I would like to see how tables are connected, what manipulations are being done, when a query/view/macro was last used, what outputs being delivered. 

Thanks!

Gina

Hello

Alteryx Server with SSO configuration not able to sign request. Could you remind ? We need this feature to go into production (see attached image). 

best regards,

Nissar

Hi, 

I think it would be extremely useful to be able to trigger an Alteryx workflow using Power Automate. 

The main benefit I see at the moment is automatically triggering an Alteryx workflow when the input data has been refreshed.

This would also enable a Power App to be added directly to Power Bi which can simply be clicked to re-run an Alteryx workflow then refresh the Power Bi dataset. 

It would be helpful if there was a way to setup notifications so that it would email Admin whenever a workflow runs longer than a preset amount of time.

Admin would set time threshold for triggering notification i.e. > 15min and Alteryx Server would email Admin whenever a workflow runs longer than that so that they could monitor this specific workflow and take corrective action,

Our Organization uses a Password Manager to automate the update of service account credentials used in Windows Services. 

Would like to request the ability to leverage that functionality with the Run As user inside of Alteryx Server Settings used with Workflows. 

This would increase application security, while ensuring the process is automated, thereby limiting issues from human interaction.

Examples of these types of application are ERPM(Enterprise Random Password Manager), Thycotic Secret Server, and I am sure there are others. 

Hello, 

We have been building a solution for a client that involved chaining apps. When we uploaded the workflow to the server, we got the below error: Workflow exceeded maximum runtime of 30 seconds and was cancelled. We were able to rectify this by having the client implement the change here. While I understand the need for the limit, is there any plan to have this fix be more obvious to the average user to implement or avoid needing to reimplement following a server upgrade?

Thanks, 

When I publish a workflow, I want it to have different behaviour based on the collection from which it was executed or scheduled. Let us suppose that I create a DEV collection and a PROD collection. The workflow is shared in both. If the workflow is executed from DEV, then I will have some logic to do X (output to specific folders, etc). If from PROD, the logic will do Y. The logic will be up to me. If the collection information is captured in the MongoDB layer, then I can pull it out on the fly by joining the collections, appInfos, and AS_Queue or AS_schedules collections. Querying the DB on the fly during execution and pulling that value is trivial. Once I have it, I can use it for any sort of logic as an environment sensing variable. Can you please store the info in MongoDB?

Is there a way to check the version of the CASS data packs or other data packs on a server without logging into the server? It would be nice to have the option to check current data packs from the gallery within your profile. Today we can check the Client and Server version when logged in as a user. 

Thank you,

Berger

It would be a nice feature for users on the 'keys' tab in gallery to provide code examples in python (maybe pre-configured in python tool) or javascript (maybe pre-configured in js tool) or even offer download of @patrick_digan 's API macro with the key/secret already placed in the macro with the end game being able to not have users stumble through building a block of code that they know or don't know should work! 

I would like to see ability to limit the number of versions a user can save of a workflow. As a server environment ages we start to see the database become unnecessarily larger because the number of version of workflows. For servers related to DEV and QA environments as an Admin I would like to be able to say users can keep their 10-25 most recent versions of their workflows. Then anything over that will start to auto-delete just like the auto save feature in Designer. 

Alteryx saves log files in UTF-16 please change the format to UTF-8 as the logs can be streamed using applications like New Relic to track the performance as they only support UTF-8 format.

Sorry if this idea has already been addressed, but I would love an enhancement that would allow users to upload multiple files to the Gallery to be processed and ran by a published app. 

Currently, the only way to accomplish this is by adding multiple File Browse tools to the published app. But if you have a workflow that needs to upload more than a couple files, this becomes a problem.