Alteryx Server Ideas

Hello, I would like improved user management features and/or training

• Display 100 does not seem to work consistently
• Click /navigate from user to user – once I select a user would like to go to next user
• Changes I make with filters refresh every time I go back – which means I have to constantly reset my view in between each user
• Modify user settings in collections – would like to modify user settings instead of delete and re add user

It would be very useful to have a standardized method to set up notifications to the server admins and to the job owner themselves if an alteryx canvas fails (error).

My understanding is that currently the only way to do notifications on failure for every canvas is for every canvas to individually set up events.   On a large implementation, this becomes very difficult to manage.

When saving to our company's gallery, we must deselect dozens of assets for our numerous workflows every time they need to be resaved, which is very frequent.

I would like to suggest a select/deselect all button under manage workflow assets. This would save a considerable amount of time.

Thank you,
Daniel

Currently the e-mail settings for the server are set up using a wizard and are not available within the admin UI.

Please could you add an explicit section to the Admin UI to allow the admin team to set up approved SMTP settings, allowing this all to be managed in one admin console.

Further: Can you allow the admins to push these settings down to the desktop users.   This would allow the admin team to control the SMTP usage and prevent data leakage.   It would also reduce complexity for the user since the SMTP settings are all pre-set making eMail tools; and Events easier to set up.

*This is an idea from @cneivam  from the Portuguese Community*

• Being able to control the workload in Alteryx Server (for example, making sure that a workflow can run only when another set of workflows finish running)

Currently the server diagnostics (http://localhost/gallery/admin/#!diagnostics) covers a narrow time window (from what I can see - only the last few hours)

.... and if you attempt to zoom out or pan to see a broader time window - the graph gets smaller, but the data does not grow to fill the remaining space

Please could we request 2 changes:

a) add a time axis on the bottom of this chart so that the user can understand the time dimension 

b) Increase the time available for analytics to an arbitrarily broad set of data (which the admin can configure as a server setup parameter - retention period).   For us - we'd want to keep at least 3 months of data, and be able to view this analytically.

Thank you 

Sean

See following article for background reference: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Discussions/workflow-exceeded-maximum-runtime-of-30-...

I have a support case (#00278355) advising unsupported changes to the alteryx.config file, involving an undocumented setting for chainedTimeout, as in:

<engine enableAutoLicensing="true" useServiceLayerComposer="true" chainedTimeout="10800"

This setting should be documented, supported, and made user-configurable through the System Settings GUI. 

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.

Hey Team,

With 2020.3, the new Groups feature came into light, which is great, but seems like it was only half-thought.

It would have been nicely complemented with some API endpoints that would allow managing the groups' members - add, remove, list members, etc.

Seems like the API on Alteryx is like 100 steps behind and seems like the new developments are not considering adding APIs for the new released features. I feel this is a product roadmap issue.

As an admin, I would like far more ways to automate managing the Server/Gallery than the ones currently provided by Alteryx.

Integration with AD would be nice as well, we use SAML, and would like to have the option to import AD groups that would sync automatically in Alteryx - same way Tableau has those groups that are imported directly from AD.

Thanks,

Alex

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.

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

If a job fails it would be perfect if we could set something in the workflow settings so that the job would retry again in X number of minutes for the next Y number of times. We have jobs that connect to external resources and sometimes the network will reset and will cause the connections to all drop. An example would be I want a workflow to try again in 10 minutes for a maximum of 5 times so over the next 50 mins it will retry every 10 mins if it fails

Hey there,

Below you can see few of my suggestion to improve Alteryx Server. 

Idea for Alteryx Server monitoring:

• Increase data what could be seen on workflow results.
• Possibly create a report with filter option (to filter by user, gallery, workflow and etc.), which would at least contain data like:
  • Successfully ran workflows, count, percentage.
  • Failure rates, counts and etc.
  • Live data for monitoring purposes.
  • etc.
• Possibility to connect to workflow results data (live data) with other tools like Tableau or Power BI to create dashboards and etc. to monitor and act on the error as soon as possible.
• Give a chance for other users to check on the workflow statuses and etc same like workflow owner.

Give server more functionality with:

• Ability for server automatically retry workflow based on configurations: in example:
  • retry flow in specific time (for example in 30 minutes)
  • number of possible retries
  • based on specific workflow (other) results ability to trigger to run another workflow
  • (Maybe there is a better way) ability to run macros which would for example open MS Excel, and run macro inside it. I have some of the workflows where workflow opens excel, runs macro inside, that macro triggers special Add In which connects to Essbase, it pulls the data, saves excel file, and then alteryx continues working with the file. So if such or similar workflows could be run on Server that would be awesome.
  • This is extremely exiting one: possibility to create environment for self-service users, which it would not be something like gallery (because gallery is more suitable for Alteryx Designers/users).
    • in that one environment admin could grant access for user and tick what specific user could see and run.
    • so for admin it would be one environment, and user would see only what is needed for him/her.
    • in that environment user would also be able to schedule self-service workflows to be received in example by email, or BOX drive or any other way. Scheduled workflow would have to be approved by an admin before it would be actually scheduled. 
  • I have not tried this one myself, but that would also be great if all alteryx server environment could be accessed by mobile devices (of course, some features would be limited).

 Hopefully you will find these suggestions interesting and useful. 

Regards,

Aurimas

I'm not sure if this is too similar to this server idea

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Ideas/Using-Microsoft-Flow-to-trigger-workflows/idi-...

but I'd love to see the ability to add webhooks to Alteryx Server to launch a workflow.  I believe that is how Flow (now PowerAutomate) can run an event.  I had to spend hours figuring out how to build a "Flow" workflow which would have taken me minutes in Designer.  For example, when I receive a new MS Forms Survey submission, I can shape the data and build a sharepoint list, rather than waiting for whatever interval I set in the scheduler.

Can we make API function available to assign specific worker node while submitting job request using api.

When saving a workflow to the gallery, none of the options I could choose from Set workflow credentials validates a workflow successfully when using database connections due to missing permission on the server (No specific Run As is configured on the Server). Apparently the server validates the workflow as following:

User is not required to specify credentials:No possibility to add credentials when running the workflow on the server. In that case, the workflow validates database connections with errors due to missing permission on the server. This error was expected.

User must specify their own credentials: This option is the most appropriate in case of working with database connections with regard to our use cases and security policies. Unfortunately this option is only enabled when the workflow is saved on the server already and run from the gallery. In case of the validation step when saving the workflow to the gallery, the server evaluates with the system user of the server. As a result, the validation fails. In that case, I expected the server to run the validation with the user from the Alteryx Designer.

Always run this workflow with these credentials: This option is not appropriate in terms of our security policy, since the workflow is permanently set with the users credentials.

So my suggestion would be to:

• Prompt dialog to enter my credentials for validation once or
• The server runs the validation with the User from Designer, where the workflow is going to be saved from.

Otherwise is see no benefit of the validation feature (with respect to our use cases and security policies)

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.

It would be great if each user could persist their gallery UI sorting/view changes and leave them as default. When I log in I nearly always immediately switch to list view and sort by most recent modified. This means everytime I access a set of workflows there are at least 3 click actions before I can even start working.