Alteryx Server Ideas

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

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 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): 

I've seen various solutions/workarounds but this seems to be a table-stakes ask?  When scheduling a workflow I should be able to specify which parameter values to run with.  Just two of many use case examples - 

Use case #1 - a single analytic app could be scheduled multiple times, each schedule specifying a different line of business

Use case #2 - credentials, allow the user to schedule a workflow with their saved credentials.  When their credentials change all they would have to do is update the schedule parameters

(If you know a better way I'm all ears, not the API thought that isn't a bad way to do it, just not super Easy)

I would like to see the enhancement of being able to schedule a start and stop time for specific jobs that need to run multiple times per day, so they don't run during the nightly backup periods of the Alteryx server. This can cause the daily backups of the Alteryx Gallery to fail. Currently SQL Server Management Studio/SQL Server has the function to able to schedule start and stop times for specific job. Currently Scheduler page on Alteryx Gallery/Server lacks this feature.

SQL Server Management Studio

Schedules on Alteryx Gallery/Server

Currently, failed job results stay in the Mongo DB forever.  Please either make it adhere to the same coding in the Server Settings for "Delete queue and results after (days)" setting, or make it a separate option for failed jobs. 

Improve Gallery scheduling to allow the end user to specify company denoted Holidays when scheduling a workflow. If the workflow is scheduled on a Holiday the schedule would not run. This should be configurable per workflow schedule. Example: A daily report Monday through Friday would be able to skip Holidays based off a Holiday exclusion list. 

As the Server Admin I'd like to have the ability to view ALL "Workflow Results" for all Subscriptions.This will give the highest level admin the ability to monitor all schedules (on the entire server instance) and monitor if they are unable to complete successfully (example- unable to allocate memory) and any other errors are occurring. 

Knowing this information will help the server administrator understand if there are issues with the server itself (e.g. if we need more workers or to simply adjust actual server system settings..etc..)

Currently when scheduling workflows, there is an option to schedule based on the calendar day but not on business day. For example, if I want to run a workflow on Business Day 1 of every month, it is not necessarily the first day of every Month. For the month of June 2019, Business Day 1 is June 3rd, since the 1st and 2nd fall on the weekend. Many departments run their processes on Business Days rather than Calendar days. Also factoring Holidays into consideration would be a plus since January 1st for example is a Holiday, Business Day 1 would fall on the 2nd.

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.

Hi

In a heavily used server environment, and depending on how workflows are deployed, it is possible to accumulate a vast number of "one off" workflows that could/should be deleted  as they would never be used again. In one of our environments we have over 1 million of these.

Currently we are manually deleting them 500 at a time but have asked if there is a way to script the delete process to make it more efficient. We have been told that to really delete a workflow you would need to touch at least 4 collections.

Can we have a Delete workflow API in one of the next releases in order to address this issue?

Thank you

Tom Diroff

There is a strong need for more APIs to be introduced in Alteryx Server so that our Admin teams can provide automated solutions to our users. My understanding is that a lot of these will be introduced into Alteryx Analytics Hub however, it is also needed in Alteryx Server.

I would propose that the internal APIs for Collections and Scheduler be exposed to the Admin Key/Secrets so that we can use these APIs to move our Users workflows directly to their collection or automatically schedule for them, if needed. It seems that all this would take would be to release the Authorization from internal to the Admin on the API.

APIs I am requesting be released:

• PUT .../gallery/api/collections/{collectionID}/apps/{appID}/
• POST .../gallery/api/scheduler/

Submitting this idea based on the Case #00361430.
 

We are trying to do alteryx workflow chaining based on workflows available in alteryx gallery, but this option is not currently available in alteryx right now and we are raising this idea to enable this feature in upcoming release or existing version patches.

Currently couple of methods available; saving the workflow in network share drive and chain the alteryx workflow based on events or run another analytical app on success.

The disadvantage of these methods are,

1. We cannot have version history maintained for the workflows in network share drive.

2. We cannot able to run a specific workflow in chaining as the workflows are packaged together.

For whatever reason a schedule is disabled, whether a Studio expires, or for any other legitimate reason, a notification email should be sent to the Admin and the one that created the schedule in advance of it being disabled. When a scheduled workflow is not executed, it leaves us scrambling for answers. A sudden disablement of the schedule is disappointing to discover after all other stones have been turned. Notify us in advance of a schedule being disabled. 

I really want to see this feature in new versions. Its frustrating the lack of options we have with scheduling workflows on the server. I need to have my process run every 10 mins but only on certain days and in certain time windows. Creating a schedule for this is impossible unless I manually create hundreds of schedules. 

I have a few workflows that I have hosted on out Gallery Server and I have them scheduled.

Ex: Process A is scheduled to run every 10 mins Mon – Sunday.

Problem: I only need Process A to run Every 10 Mins on Mon – Sat from 2 AM to 6 PM

Currently there is not a scheduling configurations that allow this type of schedule. How can I get my workflow to run every 10 mins but only during certain times and on certain dates?

The Schedules tab of the Gallery currently lists all schedules, 20 to a page, with no option to filter.  I am currently managing 183 active schedules.  In order to find a single schedule, I have to sort by Workflow name, then page through 10 pages of schedules to find the schedule I'm looking for.

Please add an option to filter this list. 

Ideally, I would like to be able to filter on multiple fields at once (example:  Priority = High, Status = Active, Owner = Bob Smith, Times Run > 20).  Barring that, a simple search option on workflow name, similar to the search option on the Collections tab, would be enough.

Use case: I need to schedule a workflow to run every 2 hours each day, with the first run at 7am and the last run at 7pm

Current solution: I need to create seven daily schedules for each hour that i need the workflow to run

Idea: Add an intraday "Start Time" and "Stop Time", or "Between" to the "Minutes / Hours" schedule type, so i can create one schedule that meets the use case requirements

Example schedule with new parameters that meets use case requirements:

Start Time = 7:00 AM

Stop Time = 7:00 PM

Repeat Every = 2 hours

Start Time could default to 12:00 AM

Stop Time could default to 11:59 PM

Hi,

The schedules page on server needs an overhaul.  Sorry to be so blunt but it is awful.  It is by far the worst aspect of Alteryx and one of the most important at the same time.

Here are a few points about it...

1.) Sorting needs to be fixed as it doesn't work correctly (sorting on the first column, "Workflow", returns items that start with 'L', 'S' and a zero as the first three on the list), so looking for 1 scheduled item across 10+ pages of schedules becomes a "needle in a haystack" endeavor.

2.) There are no search and/or filter capabilities which would help alleviate the pain-point mentioned above.

3.) [Missing] items automatically removed from schedule when the workflow is removed from the server.  It just jumbles up the screen with useless information.

4.) The 'Schedule' column doesn't need to reflect the name again like the 'Workflow' column. is a hyperlink and the other isnt.  I cant tell you how many times I have clicked on the wrong hyperlink only to have to go back and deal with point #1 all over again.  Can't it just be a simple calendar icon or something like that next to the Workflow name?

5.) While not as critical, but more of a 'nice to have' function.  An ability to export the list of schedules would be helpful.  If we ever need to divy up work for an employee that leaves the company it would be a good way to see all of the work they have out there and mark up the list to distribute info for reassignment purposes, etc. 

I am sure there are other aspects I am missing, but here are the most important ones to me as an end-user (Not an Admin)

Thanks for listening.  🙂

It should be possible to schedule chained apps. Particularly useful when the first workflow in a chain runs a check and if the check returns true then the next workflows run and if the check returns false then the next workflow should not run. 

Possibly related to:
Schedule Configured Analytic Apps - Alteryx Community