Alteryx Server Ideas

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.

Data Connections and Workflow Credentials are key part of migration process for workflows to Gallery.

They are provisioned for each user upon request.

When a developer leaves the organization, there is no easy way to identify all the Data Connections and Workflow Credentials assigned to that user.

Current options in the Gallery is for the Admin to browse through each Data Connection and Workflow Credential, navigate the Users tab and identify the list users. 

For a large organization with many Data Connections and Workflow Credentials it will hard to manage this since.

1. If the workflows change ownership, the new owner has to be given access to the Data Connections and Workflow Credentials.

2. Remove user access to the Data Connections and Workflow Credentials.

A Gallery page in Admin should include all Assets a user owns/has access to which includes the following. By selecting a user, the list should populate.

1. Workflows
2. Schedules
3. Collections
4. Data Connections
5. Workflow Credentials

We have implemented a solution to capture this information by getting the details from MongoDB. Also an automated process where the list goes to the manager when a developer leaves the organization so that he can manage the assets by identifying a new owner for the assets.

In the new version, we have an easy way to change ownership of a workflow in Gallery. In the same manner other Assets also should be taken care.

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  

Alteryx Server does not presently support any file encryption systems. Many people need to encrypt there Fileshare as a secure measurement and use safeguard lan encrypted. Please provide a solution so workers are able to read and write encrypted files through safeguard lan encrypted.

Hello Alteryx Developers,

It would be great if you develop a way to connect the Alteryx Designer to AWS Redshift by SSO. When i try to set this type of connection at the Simba ODBC Driver it opens the connection several times with AWS at the browser and that ruin the customer experience.

Best Regards

Danilo Benjamin

Option to Zip All Outputs

For workflows that produce various different output files, I think it would be nice if the Gallery had the functionality to create a single zip file containing all outputs. The user would opt in or out of this functionality using a checkbox in the Gallery workflow settings (for apps, this checkbox could also appear as an additional setting above "Questions"). After the workflow has been run, the user would only see the zip file in the output preview instead of each individual output file. 

This functionality would create a more user-friendly experience as it would eliminate the need for zip file creation workarounds, such as using the Run Command Tool or the "zipfile" Python library to create zip files (these options also do not generate a zip file in the Gallery output preview).

Workflows which are scheduled and continuously failing in a row 5 times need to stop/disable the schedule. Sent a mail to the workflow owner stopped schedule due to continuous error.

For Administrating the schedule workflows this feature helps a lot. Many users create workflows and dump into server and schedule it and forgot it if we implement this strategy, it will be helpful to both users and Admin team.

At my organization, we have many workflows on our server that take data from one database and store it on another. We would love the ability for an alert system that warns us when a job fails so that we can solve it immediately and not risk the chance of not noticing until a few weeks or months later.

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. 

As we look at upgrading Alteryx Server - one of the challenges is that it's an all-or-nothing approach; and there doesn't seem to be a guided wizard approach to upgrading.

The upgrade process would be much less intimidating if we could create a Migration tool which can work across versions - similar to Microsoft SQL Server which has the.    This would allow us to:
- Migrate a subset of assets up or down versions

- Migrate across servers to do consolidation or to split loads into different servers for the purpose of segregation

- Progressively migrate over time to limit the risk.

cc: @JohnPelletier 

I would like to see some functionality in the Alteryx Gallery in which you can select multiple schedule workflows to disable/enable. Currently as an admin if I have many schedules I need to enable/disable I need to go into each schedule manually to disable or enable. This is okay for one or two, but I have about 20-30, it is very time consuming. I would like to see maybe some checkbox functionality next to the workflow to select and then an option to either disable all selected or enable all selected.

While in a workspace or collection, it would be great to be able to select multiple workflows and perform a bulk action on them (e.g. delete). This would help cleaning up unused workflows quicker.

Thank you

I would like to suggest the idea of being able to handle row-level security data sources in a more seamless way using Kerberos passthrough, where Alteryx Gallery will pass the information that User A is running the workflow to the underlying DB and will authenticate as User A. 

We have many workflows that are built to handle different queries of a database that are reliant on knowing who is running the workflow in Gallery. We also have many regional workers, and we want to keep the administration of these connections to the data as simple as possible. 

For more information, check out the Community thread on this subject.

I have a lot of workflows that depend on each other. Currently there's LOTS of hassle to effectively schedule a set of workflows to run subsequent.

Typically we run workflows (eg. product hierarchies) that would need to be completed before the next workflow should start (eg. sales data). We currently have some wonky workarounds that are high maintenance, but I would love to see this as a feature in the Gallery.

We have groups asking within our organization for ways to check the status of a running workflow in Gallery. They are wanting to understand which step in the process the workflow has completed for longer-running workflows.

They are looking for an experience similar to when running in Designer where they can see which tools have been completed. At the very least, they would like the log to be reported live and not shown at the end of the run.

Currently, the run feels like a black box where they do not know how close it is to completion or which steps it has made it through.

We have tried to build workarounds like the Email tool, but have been unsuccessful. For example, the Email tool does not send an Email until the workflow completes which defeats the purpose. The closest workaround is writing our own log along the way that can be reported on which is not a clean solution. 

Hello all,

As of today, if you want to give the Alteryx Gallery user an Excel with your data out of your worfklow, you MUST design an Excel Report with Report tools.

However :
1/ It's highly time consuming to design the report
2/ It leads to many errors, especially on column size : a quick research on Alteryx community gives you several hundred topics
3/ the excel output works really fine

This is frustrating as hell for users !

Best regards,

Simon

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,

Enhance the v3 APi for workflows - /v3/workflows/{workflowid} - to get information for first n versions and/or last n versions of the workflow.

The problem

The current API will return information about all versions of a workflow. If a workflow has several hundred versions, you'll get all version information, much of which is useless and can take a long time to process.

The (potential) solution

Allow the API to take parameters like first n versions and last n versions. This will allow the API to return only the respective version information that would be of interest to the user.

The red box in the image is the enhancement in swagger:

Hi Team, 

The Alteryx API documentation for Audit was only available for certain entities(workflow, collection, etc.,) and not available for Schedule entities

If you create a schedule in Gallery, information about the schedule like creation date time, frequency, owner, type, last run, next run, etc. will be updated in MongoDB. If a user edits or modifies a schedule in the gallery, the edited/updated information is only available in MongoDB. There is no possibility of seeing audit information like old value(before change), new value, or operation (update, delete, insert).

We required the Audit information of the entire gallery operation such as schedule, Collection, Workflow creation, updation, and deletion. 

Regards, 
Ariharan Rengasamy