alteryx server Ideas

We have several clients that operate in a Multi-Forest environment due to mergers and acquisitions.  Currently with Alteryx Server the only option we can offer them is to use Built-In authentication.  A lot of corporate and particularly finance institutions prefer a single sign on approach and utilise Windows authentication to do this.

Would it be possible to add support for Multi-Forest organisations into Server to support organisations going through mergers and acquisitions?

This would really benefit us in selling Server in to organisations with complex structures and reduce friction in publishing or preparing workflows.

Would like to see a Notification hierarchy implemented to Gallery. Currently, the settings that control notifications are at the Gallery-level....where only the admin can control, for example, notifying users if a new workflow was added to a collection they belong too. Could this setting be inherited, but then, for example, a Collection owner can implement their own notification settings that overrides the Gallery default? Using the same example as before, perhaps the Collection owner could disable notifying their Users if a new workflow is loaded to the collection.

Nick

Hey Alteryx,

I'm liking the new ability to change the permission for users to schedule, prioritize and assign their work.

I would also like the Permissions to not show if I've turned it off. For most users this feature will not be available and showing a feature they won't be able to use will cause more problems then answers.

Just like in the notification tab, I would like the features that are off not show up in the end users profile tab

It would also be nice if we could assign this to a workflow and not just a person. A more likely scenario is that an App that needs a user input shouldn't be scheduled since it won't work. 

To have the ability to turn off the scheduling for just that workflow is more likely then to turn off that feature for an entire person.

Thank you

Today in managing Alteryx server, we manually configure new connections using the front end.  However, this has some potential drawbacks as it makes it hard to easily track change history, or make bulk updates to multiple strings, and it also leaves room for user error on configuration.

In this case I'm pretty specifically looking to modify aliases on the server itself.  I'm not particularly concerned with distribution to a wider audience, and the usernames/passwords associated in this case should not be available for use locally by users.  As a part of this, I am trying to identify a method to reduce or eliminate the need for anyone (including the data connection manager) to need to know the password for the specified accounts.  As some of these accounts may be used by multiple systems, it would be significantly simpler to integrate this maintenance into existing automated processes, rather than have a manual step to update the Alteryx connection values on the Gallery.

This is specifically a challenge today with regards to specific usernames or passwords which need to be stored.  Alteryx saves these values using machine-level encryption, but that is difficult to generate automatically.  Having a supported method that would easily allow creation of this file with password-level information would greatly improve maintenance of the Alteryx Server, particularly from an IT automation perspective.

Would it be possible to specify whether a worker handles scheduled jobs, ad-hoc jobs or both?  Right now it seems that the workers treat both types of jobs the same, meaning that a slew of ad-hoc jobs initiated from the Gallery could slow down jobs that are scheduled to run on a regular cadence.  It'd be great if those scheduled jobs could have a dedicated worker (or workers) and have any ad-hoc jobs handled by a separate worker (or workers) so that the scheduled jobs (which might be more important) are not held up by one-off jobs.

In some organizations, it may be difficult, if not impossible, for permissions to be applied or exemptions made to enable wide ranges of users the “Logon as batch job” permission needed to run workflows in a Server with the current run-as credential capability.

If possible, could the Alteryx process still run as the server admin or "Run As" account, but enable the workflow to access the various different data sources (windows authentication) using specific credentials entered when running the workflow. So while the whole process runs as Service Account A, the access to databases, file systems, etc. may be done using their own specified credentials.

Some of this can be accomplished today by embedding credentials in database connections, but this isn’t an ideal scenario, and a more holistic solution that covers a wider array (or all supported) data sources would be preferred.

Dearest colleageues and comrades (Romans, countrymen?):

Have you ever queued up your jobs only to have them block your regularly scheduled programming? Imagine a world where, assuming you had multiple worker nodes, you can direct and prioritise your jobs on your terms.

This is what I am suggesting.

I've recently worked with Alteryx support, and they turned me on to a QoS setting in Alteryx Server settings. Peep this like a marshmallow chick in hot pink: 

After learning from the great Server Master Kevin Powney (blessed be his name), I learnt that there are currently 3 'channels' that this QoS variable governs. 0 is the highest priority used for workflows. 4 is used for chained apps. 6 is used for gallery service requests.

This will not do.

Why? Well, for one: hello arcane/memorisation.

Secondly, where is my control? I'm a millenial dammit! Service me!

So, my idea, that I want you to vote so highly on as to save yourself any myself a lot of hassle, is to allow a custom QoS variable to be a traffic variable. And here's how it works:

• For each workflow/app, you can assign it whatever QoS/traffic variable you choose. 
• This allows the user the power to control which 'lane' is clogged in the queue.

Example time! [cheers, candy thrown]

In my current situation, we have some jobs that are network-intensive (database calls), and jobs that are processing-intensive (CPU hogs doing hard-core maths). 

The network-intensive jobs run on the weekends so that we have the data in the morning on Monday. The processing-intensive jobs need to finish, but suck up all the CPU power. For the last couple of weeks, we've unsuccessfully run these jobs over the weekend. The downside is that since we cannot control how traffic flows (and we only have the 0/4/6 options in QoS, of which these only fit in the 0 lane [breath, sorry]) the CPU-heavy jobs have blocked more critical network jobs.

If we had two paths, we could assign the CPU jobs to lane 1 and the network jobs to lane 0 and they can run in parallel. And then my boss is happy. We like happy bosses, right?

Vote this up! My boss is awesome!

Thanks for your ear,

Hail Caesar or something.

-Cedric

Option to update ownership to any other valid license holder as needed.

Use Case: Currently the canvas owner is marked by default as the user publishing the canvas to production.

However, we have seen instances where the person moves teams and would like to hand it over to another person.

Hello,

Looks like the user inputs (check boxes, free text fields, drop downs, file uploads etc., ) to the app are "temporarily" stored during the course of the app "Run" time. These - especially the "uploaded files" get deleted from  the temporary folder after the successful run of the workflow.

Ex: user uploads 2 files to the app as inputs. see attached interface.

It is important that the user selections are persisted on the alteryx server for debugging, investigation, audit trail purposes.

Of-course - there are workarounds by some extra code/logic within the app. But - in-order for the "server" tool to be considered as robust/industrialized - it is critical to "log" the user interactions on the server side.

Is it something already looked into?

Regards,

Sandeep.

I work at a large organization where Security and Privacy are of utmost importance. The ideology that we need to follow is Least Privilege and Need to Know.

We (Curators) do not want all the Artisans to publish workflows to Home Page, either knowingly or unknowingly. We however do want to allow a few power users to publish their work in Home Page, but currently the Gallery does not provide the ability to pick and choose who can share workflows publicly. We are educating users to not share any contents publicly, but as we scale up, it will be difficult to manage and govern this.

I'm suggesting to implement a global Yes/No feature that will Enable/Disable Artisans to publish contents in Home Page (just like the way we have for Jobs/Scheduling feature). Further, in Users section, Edit User setting needs to have a Yes/No button that will allow Curators to let certain Artisans place workflows in My Company's Gallery.

Organizations that never want any workflow to be shared publicly can disable this feature using global Yes/No button. Organizations (like the one I work at) that want to enable this only for certain Artisans, can set the Global Yes/No to No, and then in Users tab, they can pick and choose the Users that need this functionality (which will override the global default). Finally Organizations that do not really care about this functionality can just set the global setting to Yes.

Hoping other organizations find value in this functionality as well. Thanks.

Hello,

Currently we are working on an issue where we are seeing an "inbound pipe" error during a scheduled workflow, terminating at the error.

However, the workflow doesn't officially complete; it simply terminates.

For the majority of workflows, when a workflow runs with errors, completing with errors, even if the workflow was unsuccessful, you can send an email via the events for that workflow, if the workflow completes with errors, to use as an alert or trigger, etc...

However this doesn't work when a workflow suddenly terminates with errors.

I'd like to see functionality added to all ow for an email event when a workflow terminates unexpectedly, without completing.

This way, I could set up a job to re-trigger the workflow if this happens.

This can occur when memory is swamped during the initial workflow.

This functionality would be a huge positive.

Thanks

Hi there,

As a beginner in Alteryx with experience in other analytics software, I noticed that there may be a very simple thing that I think could be adjusted which I feel could improve the experience of a beginner in Alteryx. Also happy to know if this is already possible.

When I was doing a introduction training, I noticed that a lot of the questions were regarding not being able to see the right output, regardless of the usage of the right tools & settings. Luckily, we were provided with a good trainer that immediately saw that there was a very simple reason for this: the 'output' button (sometimes called differently, for instance in a select it is called 'true' or 'false') was not selected. Instead people were looking at the input or something else. I can even imagine that some more advanced users have spend a few minutes wondering what was wrong until they realised they weren't looking at the output.

It seems to me to be a bit random when output or input gets selected, and as someone with experience in (preventing) addiction in the gaming industry, I know that the first experience is crucial for someone to get 'hooked' :-), and this small inconsistency seems to break the flow a bit. Could you make the default setting such that a tool shows the output rather than the input by default? A possible addition would be an option that switches a tool back to input every time a button gets deselected. From a programmers/data science perspective, that would also make a lot of sense.

Regards,

Charles

I'd love the ability to have one schedule for a workflow at specific times. 

Currently you have to create 4 different schedules if you'd like a workflow to run at 10 am, 3 pm, 5:30 pm and 11:30 pm and doing this makes the "Scheduled Workflow" section of the server not only cluttered, but a lot more difficult to manage.  (like spotting accidentally duplicated schedules- which also happens more often than i'd like

Thanks!

When installing and configuring Alteryx, the wizard allows the administrator to select the Gallery authentication to be used among:

Built-in

Integrated Windows authentication

Integrated Windows authentication with Kerberos

SAML authentication

The note states:

Once an authentication type has been selected, it should not be changed. Changing it may cause technical problems.

The gallery manual states "Once an authentication type has been selected it should not be changed or Gallery functionality may be compromised." 

https://help.alteryx.com/server/current/admin/Configuration/SystemSettings/Gallery.htm?Highlight=%22...

If you are reading this idea suggestion, I hope it is not too late for you. Why allow the user to change the authentication method once the install is completed? What are the options to solve this?

One option would be to grey-out the "Authentication Type" section in the  "Gallery Authentication" screen, so the user is not able to change authentication methods once after the first configuration is set. This would still allow the user to change SAML settings.

Another option, if somehow there is a reason why a user would want to change authentication types even though it is not supported, what about changing the layout to make it more difficult to change the authentication type.

What are your other suggested changes?

This is not relevant if this idea is implemented https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Ideas/Allow-changing-of-Gallery-Authentication-witho...

However, I would imagine that a UI change would be a lot easier to implement that supporting overhauling the user management in the MongoDB.

While working with Alteryx Server, I noticed that there is no way for an Premium Artisan to organize the workflow results. With processes that are running hourly, each day, the workflow results gets very cluttered with the same things, and it takes some time to clean up. It would be nice to add a search bar that would filter out workflow results dependent on what you are entering in the textbar. Below is a very lo fi mock up. The spot where I entered "dispositionReport" at the top is the text bar that filters the workflow results below it. The red lines are simulating the removal of said records. Then offer a select all option to then delete all of the workflow results records. 

As part of the Persistence Expiration processes, within Designer we have the ability to set a retention threshold of the results tab.   i.e. 30 days.

After enabling this - all completed results are purged  but all the "error" results remain.  And this depending on the original count can run into the thousands, such as in my environment.   Id like to see the "Error" results become part of the clean up processing because of the following reasons:

1.  We do not have dedicated admins that have time to manually or by group delete these error result items.

2.  Most if not all - errors are resolved immediately.   if there were to be kept as a reference, a screen shot of the results are normally taken and filed away.

Support says this is intentional for resolution tracking purposes - but to counter - as I stated in item 2 - most errors are immediately looked at and worked on. So there is no reason to keep errored results. Especially when they are time-stamped dates greater than the expiration values selected.

Enhance the USER tab in Gallery for showing the active user status, last login time

Easy to filter out the active user

Allow Admin to kill user session