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Alteryx Server Ideas

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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

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. 

indb.jpg Propagates to other workers → indb2.jpg

 

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.

 

Current State:

Currently, all workflows and applications are in list-form within "My Workspace" (formerly Private Studio) and Collections.  In My Workspace, I might have workflows and applications that support a broad range of domain spaces and audiences.  As the developer (or Artisan), they're all in My Workspace, but shown as an exhaustive list with no categorization unless I name them to represent not only the function of the workflow/application but also the domain. 

 

Once those same workflows/applications are moved to collections, there can exist confusion over whether the workflow/application is intended for a schedule, manual run, or application.  Separating by naming convention gets messy and degrades clarity for non-developer roles.

 

 

Proposed Solution:

I would like to see folders, only one or two levels deep, be added to My Workspace and to Collections.  This proposed solution would not alter permissions, as those would be common for the parent collection and any assigned roles would function the same for that entire collection.  The solution is simply adding organization to enhance the user experience.

 

For example:  I might have a Collection that is intended for my Finance team....


Finance_Collection / Scheduled_ETL_Workflows / Workflows

Finance_Collection / Scheduled_Analytic_Workflows / Workflows
Finance_Collection / Applications_for_AccountingDepartment_ReceivablesTeam / Workflows
Finance_Collection / Applications_for_AccountingDepartment_PayablesTeam / Workflows
Finance_Collection / Manual_ETL_Workflows / Workflows

Finance_Collection / Manual_Analytic_Workflows / Workflows

Finance_Collection / etc...

All persons who have been assigned the role connected to the "Finance Collection" will still see everything in all of the folders but would have a better sense of what "workflows/applications" are intended for their use according to the folders the workflows/applications are organized into.

 

 

Value Added (Why This Matters):

  • Enhanced user experience (easier to find the correct workflows
  • The volume of roles and collections can be reduced, thus reducing Admin strain
  • The solution does not impact roles and permissions
  • Overall management of workflows and applications is enhanced for the Artisans

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

I welcome input and feedback from the community and would appreciate your support if you find this suggestion useful for your Alteryx experience!

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!

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.

simonaubert_bd_0-1676961290434.png



Best regards,

Simon

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.

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,

According to https://openlineage.io/ 

 

image.png

 

 

 

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

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.

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 :

simonaubert_bd_0-1670054097259.png


Collaboration is not a luxury item !

Best regards,

Simon

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

elsastark_0-1665672271718.png

 

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

 

Scheduling Method (no app questions): 

elsastark_1-1665672495023.png

 

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.

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

  • New Request

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:

mpapadopulos_0-1686085509930.jpeg

 

 

 

 

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

mpapadopulos_1-1686085509921.jpeg

 

 

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

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 

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