Alteryx Server Ideas

Currently, Alteryx Server lacks rich job scheduling functionality to other products like Control-M and Informatica's Scheduler

Feature Requests:

1) Ability to configure job retries on failure without having to rerun the workflow based on a  event trigger: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Knowledge-Base/How-to-run-a-workflow-from-an-event...

There are common occurrences where a workflow may fail to connect to Input sources and a retry would normally resolve the issue. 

2) More user friendly way to setup dependencies between scheduled workflows.  For example, if workflow A fails it triggers workflow B to run.  If workflow B runs without errors, it triggers workflow C to run.  Currently, we would need to configure this based upon events.  A complex chain of scheduled workflows becomes difficult to manage and scale.

When scheduling workflows in the gallery that are recurring, it would be beneficial to have  start and end times also. For example, when setting the frequency to hourly, if there is an option to run between 9 AM and 5 PM that would be great. This would prevent us to schedule workflows for all 24 hours and take up systemic resources when other important workflows could run instead

Hello,


There are some tools that helps to monitor what happens on a website. Some are even open source (like matomo and open web analytics). Why not including one of those tools on Alteryx Server ?

There are of course a lot of feature but I like this one, an heatmap to show where a user click

Best regards,

Simon

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. 

I just underwent an exercise of recovering my controller in the event of a catastrophic failure. One of the steps is to recover the DCME keys (DCM Encryption keys) - which is documented here: https://help.alteryx.com/20221/en/server/install/server-host-recovery-guide/dcme-keys-to-backup.html...

This DCME recovery needs to be revisited. This document assumes that the previous controller is running. In a disaster recovery situation, this is not possible. What, if any, can be done to recover the DCME keys if the host has is completely irrecoverable?

For context, having an irrecoverable host has happened. Complete hard drive failure (showing my age), nuked virtual machine and its backups (no one paid attention to the notices that the data center was shutting down), and fire.

Currently, the API V3 endpoints does not have anything for Data Connection Manager (DCM). Create an endpoint to allow users to add/delete/update and list data sources, credentials, and users of DCM data sources. Also include an "admin" endpoint that can list all of the above for the entire server.

The admin screen of Alteryx gallery does not have an admin function for DCM sources, its users, and credentials. This can cause visibility issues during audits of the gallery. An API endpoint can alleviate this issue until it is added to the UI.

It would be nice if the Gallery Admin could download the workflow from the workflow page within the UI, without having to run API calls or having to add himself temporarily to someone else's studio. 

My team has started using an Alteryx Gallery 2022.1 instance and we have workflows that take a few minutes to run. Whenever we run a workflow, we are presented with a blank screen instead of the progress bar that we are used to in previous versions of the Gallery. I was wondering if there is a way of enabling the progress bar or at least setting up a load screen to notify the user that the workflow is in progress to avoid them wanting to re-run the application because “nothing is happening”.

This is what we are seeing:

This is what we are used to and would want to see when running our applications:

Greetings Server friends!

I was talking with @KevinP in the Solutions Center at Inspire and we talked a lot about how Server has been evolving over the last several versions. I'd like to request that end users be able to select workflows or applications shared with them as "Favorites." It would be great for ServerUI to offer a separate section for these selected "favorites" so that the end users can have a single go-to place to access their most frequently used apps.

 @JohnPelletier 

It would be beneficial to be able to add a description to collections to explain the purpose of the collection, i.e. the types of content contained within or even a waiver stating "use of the contents in this collection is at your own risk, please ensure you validate the results are accurate" sort of thing.

Currently, we see the Districts and Collections now compressed into a list view. 

Previously, the Server had the widgets feature which really showcased the self-service nature of the Sever. Losing that just made decreased the emphasis on user experience. 

It would be great to allow Server Admins to decide whether they want lists or widgets to be available toggles as a design feature for both districts and collections will be of great help.

In addition, regardless of the option, the image size and wording size should be much larger - easier for people to see. Right now, we have to zoom to 150% to make it easier for ourselves to see. Having the ability to control font size, font control with bolds, italtics, etc. will be very helpful as well.

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  

Given some jobs are scheduled / can take a while to run it would be useful if Server provided the option to notify the submitting user when it has been completed, which a link to the results.

If you look at post: Re: How do I extract Server Job Run ID at runtime - Alteryx Community amongs others you can see there have been various attempts to create workarounds for this using a combination of API's & Mongo DB calls to build up the information to provide a URL in an email at the end of the flow. However, it feels like this should be an out of the box notification that can be enabled/disabled at the flow level with Alteryx Server.

I would like the ability to "favorite" Public flows that are on the server and then have a separate "Favorites" section.  As the volume of Public flows on the server increases, It would allow for users to be able to navigate to frequently used flows much faster.

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.

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. 

After a job is run on Alteryx Server, Gallery lists Job Results with a Status column containing with one of 2 values:

• Error (represented by a red exclamation point icon); and
• Success (represented by a green checkmark icon).
  See attached screenshot for illustration.

If any WARNING messages are generated by the workflow, the operator/user is unaware unless they take the time to expand the message log details, then scroll through the long list of messages that typically appear in the log.

Because the Success Icon appears whether there are Warnings or not, the user must dutifully spend extra time scrolling through the list looking for Warnings even if there are none to be found.

My Idea: provide additional information under the Status column in one or more of these ways:

1. add a 3rd status option with a yellow/orange icon that indicates if/when 1 or more warnings are present
   • This should be a quick/easy enhancement that would provide immediate value
     
     
2. append one or more numbers after the Icon to indicate counts (see mock-up example)
   • There seems to be ample space for this type of info
   • This could be done at a later date as a subsequent enhancement

I think that the user would benefit from a filter where they could focus on errors, warnings, or other types of messages in the same spirit as the Designer interface, but I recognize that would be a lot of work and I am not asking for that now.

Maintaining multiple workers (five currently, soon, six) with identical setups is challenging when dealing with In-Database (InDb) connections. I must log in to each worker, start Alteryx Designer, go to In-Db settings, and create the connection. This also becomes tedious when trying to update passwords, which occurs every 90 days in my company.

The suggestion is to set up an In-Db connection on one worker and have it propagate to the other workers. 

Propagates to other workers →

This would save time maintaining workers in the gallery and help prevent errors during setup on each worker (e.g., typing in the wrong password).

As an "extra credit" mission, expose In-Db connections through an API that can list, create, update, or delete an In-Db connection.

Hello all,

According to https://openlineage.io/ 

An open framework for data lineage collection and analysis

Data lineage is the foundation for a new generation of powerful, context-aware data tools and best practices. OpenLineage enables consistent collection of lineage metadata, creating a deeper understanding of how data is produced and used.

 
This is typically the open standards needed for lineage analysis and I think it will become more and more a differenciator with your competitors. As of today, DBT or Apache Airflow already supports it (as producer), Egeria or Marquez already support it (as consumer) and guys from Datahub are working on it  (as consumers)https://feature-requests.datahubproject.io/p/openlineage
So I think Alteryx should implement this standard API as a producer, it's the next big thing in Data Governance and you don't want to stay behind !

Best regards,

Simon