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

Hello! We just upgraded to 23.2, and I see in v3 an endpoint to start a job (v3/workflows/{id}/jobs) and then another to get that job's status (v3/jobs/{jobID}). Compared to v1, I think the outputs endpoint is missing (v1/jobs/{jobID}/output/{outputID}). I'd love for this to be added so we can upgrade from v1 to v3. 

The dcm admin apis look promising. I would love if they could add put endpoints for sharing/execution and sharing/collaboration for admins. There is already a delete command for those two endpoints

I want to let my artisans choose the collaboration option when sharing dcm sources. Currently they'd have to be promoted to curators to do this.

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

Previously, Alteryx Gallery had a progress bar when the job is running. However, it has been removed in the newer version and the screen only appear blank when the job is running. This could lead to confusion in users as they might be wondering what is happening when the screen goes blank when it actually is running the job. Users might also attempt to click the run button repeatedly due to this.

Hence, I hope Alteryx could bring back the old UI that showed progress bar or anything similar when the job is running so users will aware of what is happening. 

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.

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

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

the idea would be to be able to chain Workflows (execute Workflow B at the end of Workflow A). Or to condition the execution of a Workflow in relation to another when there are dependencies.

Most companies work on a period level basis and that is every 4 weeks.  There is no way in Alteryx currently to schedule workflows to run only every 4 weeks, the monthly options do not match this cadence.  If the option was added to select "every X week(s) on X day" this would also encompass biweekly scheduling as well.  Outlook currently has exactly what would be needed (screenshot attached.)

Hi Team,

We used the 2021.3 version earlier, which included a user interface feature allowing for search by owner and a
few other filters. However, upon upgrading the server to the 2022.1 version, we discovered that this option was no longer present on the UI page. Moving forward, it is imperative that this functionality be reintroduced in future releases of Alteryx for better user experience.

Regards, 

Ariharan Rengasamy

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.

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.

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.

The AlteryxService internal authenticated API that the nodes use to communicate with each other for status is not accessible to customers because it is using an undocumented authentication method. The data this appears to provide would be useful to server administrators to determine the true health of the individual nodes and for reporting purposes.

When I create a DCM Entry in Gallery, it would be great if the users I share it with would also be able to reference the credentials in their desktop designer when they sync their connections to the Gallery. 

When adding jobs to the queue via API call, you currently cannot specify the name of the job.

Running the job directly from gallery allows this as in the picture below, but there is no setting to do so in the API.

When a workflow is used in many different situations, being able to specify a name for the individual run will make tracking and troubleshooting easier.

after run workflow in server, it has to download output files one by one. it very annoying when the number is huge.

please change like other platform like SharePoint etc. enable select all options and/or download all options.

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: