Alteryx Server Ideas

2021.4 Server comes with a ton of new great features. 

The one that shouldn't be implemented is moving away from Alteryx initial intentions of being a place of data artisans, and turning the Gallery into a Spreadsheet.

A homepage should feel like home. It should have the flexibility to customize it for each Organization to move workflows, pictures, and notes around to guide the user to the application they need to run their workflow. 

Most people using the HomePage Gallery aren't major developers, but new users or even non-analysts who want to run an app to get the report they need. 

Please don't go backward by taking away flexibility, readability, and increasing difficulty to understand and get to an app. 

But give more freedom to Alteryx Admins to customize and make the user experience even better. 

Lean more into these ideas where we can showcase and feature apps and show descriptions of tools

Just like your homepage we should be able to show videos and use negative spacing to help guide users, and be able to scroll down the page

Instead, you took away all spaces and tried to turn everything into raw data. There were spaces and extra lines on the app, but it's all stripped away on the Gallery in 2021.4

Again, lean into your roots of canvases where each artisan can design and put tools and items that make sense to them and their Organization. 
Please add features... don't take them away

Hello,

It would be beneficial to have integration between Alteryx and SIEM solutions, and  send all Alteryx logs to the SIEM solution just like any other IT solution. The reason is to comply with the policies of customers, where InfoSec team must have centralized logging for all systems and hence a holistic view of the security posture for the infrastructure.

An Example of this would be seeing logs concerning change of user privileges' and system settings (on the SIEM).

Hi!

It would be very useful if Alteryx would allow users to create folders under their Private Gallery. My private gallery is now 3+ pages long & it would be super helpful to be able to organize the workflows into different folders (Archive/Retail/Linear/Fin/etc), allowing for easier housekeeping & tracking. I realize their is collections but I'm not trying to share anything here, just organize my content for easier viewing.

Thank you!

Currently it's impossible to tell which worker a job is running on. Add a column to the jobs view that shows what worker a job is currently running on.

Currently, if we want to assign a worker node it has to be done at the workflow level.  It would be very helpful to be able to make a rule that auto-assigns the type of workflows to a specific node, so all apps go to one, all schedules go to another, etc.  

At the very least, if there was an API endpoint to update specific items on a workflow (such as node), this would work as well as we could then build a process that auto-assigns.

Thanks! 

I would suggest a service split to simplify maintenance actions in the Alteryx Server.

Split Alteryx Service into 5 services:

 Alteryx controller

• Dependencies: Alteryx Database
• Purpose: Controls job submissions
• Meaning: The Alteryx controller Service stopped means neither the users or the scheduler can submit new jobs

Alteryx Database

• Dependencies: N/A
• Purpose: Database
• Meaning: The Alteryx Database Service stopped means all the platform is down

Alteryx Gallery

• Dependencies: Alteryx Database
• Purpose: Controls the Web UI
• Meaning: Alteryx Gallery Service stopped means the gallery web page is down

Alteryx Scheduler

• Dependencies: Alteryx controller, Alteryx Database
• Purpose: Controls the scheduled jobs
• Meaning: The Alteryx Scheduler Service stopped means the users can still submit jobs manually but scheduled jobs wont be submited

Alteryx Worker

• Dependencies: Alteryx controller, Alteryx Database (only applicable if the server where the Alteryx Worker Service is running the Alteryx controller)
• Purpose: Executes the jobs
• Meaning: The Alteryx Worker Service stopped means no job will be executed on the node

This service split will help perform some maintenance tasks and enables the Platform Administrators to shutdown the platform correctly shutting down the services in the correct order.

Usage Example 1 (Cold Backup):

• Stop the controller so no more jobs can be submitted
• Stop all the workers
• After all the workers have stopped the Alteryx Database Service and the rest of the remaining services can be shutdown
• Preform the Cold Backup
• Start the services

Usage Example 2 (Changes in the worker configuration - By doing this the users will still have access to the gallery and their jobs):

• Make changes in the worker configuration
• Restart only the worker service

Usage Example 3 (Changes in the Gallery Page or Configurations):

• Stop the Gallery Service
• Make the changes
• Start the Gallery Service

One of our Server customers has a need to disable all schedules temporarily across all worker nodes.  I do not see an easy way to do this unless we go into each worker's settings and disable from there, but this is not ideal.

The reason is for scheduled maintenance windows during a large upgrade or migration.  Currently stopping the Alteryx Service on each worker is time consuming.

Thank you! 

currently, there isn't any way to fully delete (safely) a user from the gallery. So if there is a previous client or previous employee in gallery, we cannot clean up the gallery settings - only "disable". It would be great to have a "trash can" symbol next to the users where we can remove them from the server and keep all of the users clean. 

Our company prefers to setup active directory groups to manager our users and resources separately for better tracking of what a group has access to.  We setup global group roles with users as members and local groups with privileges to a resource and the role as a member. We would like to be able to use nested global groups in the User>groups and have it still setup the users once a nested group is setup. Attached his the priv group an role.  We were not able to login with the priv group, but could login once the role group was added.

Thanks

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

Hello Brainstrust,

Small request here (i think) , we are exclusively using Alteryx Gallery to host and orchestrate workflows in our enterprise. 

As we are connecting to disparate datasources involving many odbc connections and file paths at times when we are configuring a new source on all of our workers there may be a misconfiguration or misstep in the implementation.

When this happens , there is an intermittent failure and unfortunately its not visible what worker ran the workflow, I know this is visible in the thick client scheduler experience but as we are trying to drive Gallery as the one user experience it would be good if it was visible here too... screen shot below.

Without a doubt, Schedule Forecast is a great feature. I feel Schedule Forecast feature should be enabled for Artisans as well who usually create new schedules on Alteryx Server. Artisans can look up the existing schedule details at a specific time and decide if it is best time for their workflow to run. It will be counter productive otherwise in my opinion as curators have to inform the artisan to move their schedule to some other time as there are several other workflows running at the exact time and impact execution time. 

I would like to be able to view all schedule results from all users in my Gallery.  Currently, I can see the "Workflow Results" for any schedules I create.  But I cannot see them for users unless they share them.  As admin, I want an option on the Gallery Admin screen just like there is on the Gallery user screen to see "Workflow Results" for every schedule that is in the Scheduler Database, regardless of who the user shared it with.

Currently, the only way to accomplish this is to go to Designer, View Schedules, connect to the Controller, and go to the Results tab.  This should be built into the Admin screen in the Gallery.

Hi Team,

Earlier when we are in 2020.2 version we used to have "Company field" option when we are creating New Private Studio in the Subscription tab . Now we have Upgraded to 2020.4 version and we no longer see that option .

We have used Company Field to Tag the Solutions with certain specifications that would help us with the cost recovery mechanism.

So we need to have Option in our Use Case again.  If could you please include "Company Field" option in Subscription tab or if Subscription is deprecated then in Collection tab for coming versions it will help us a lot.

Currently , once a user have SetPriority access ,he can select from Low, Medium, High or Critical priority levels to ensure certain jobs always take priority over others.  

This feature can be misused as users can upgrade their priority levels to jump up the queue and later downgrade the levels. It's difficult to justify and ask each others when you have 1000+ jobs running in a day and it makes administration tough and gives unbiased Gallery to all end users.

It would be nice to have on Admin console, global option to set max priority level so that no user can jump up level beyond this.

Hello,
One of the frustrations we have faced in using Alteryx Gallery is the question "How do we set up many users with their respective collections easily?".

If we take for an example, the scenario where a company has 300 potential users of the gallery, who are all going to login and generate a report based on their department.
In order for them not to be able to generate the reports on other departments, the report generation workflows are put into collections. The current solution to this (atleast on SAML Authentication), is for a user to sign up, and then a Curator to assign them to their given collection. This is fine for small scale solutions, but the purpose of server is allowing for large scale deployment and automation of tasks, and this is far from ideal for a larger company.

If the server is setup on Windows Authentication, the users are able to be categorised within the Windows Active Directory, and then these groups (which may pre-exist) are able to be added to the gallery straight from the AD (see here), however this is not a feature within SAML Authentication.

From my knowledge, SAML Authentication should easily allow for this functionality, and it works very similar to Windows Active Directory. I mentioned this on a call with a Customer Support Engineer, and he explained that this wasn't part of his known roadmap for the Alteryx Gallery. 

I do believe this to be an extension of a current post on the Alteryx forum, however, this details opening the API to allow for this on an API level, however I would also suggest for this to be integrated within Alteryx Gallery, as not all users are experienced with using, or building tools around, the API.
 
Cheers,
TheOC

Currently, to allow a user to schedule jobs, prioritize jobs, assign jobs, create collections, or have API access, toggles must be set at the user level.  

As a server administrator, I want to configure these toggles at the group level, so that a) I don't have to modify a large number of users individually to grant them such permissions, b) I ensure consistency across groups of users that doesn't rely on humans clicking all the right things for each of the relevant people, and c) I can easily change these settings for multiple people, if needed.

Hello

Alteryx Server with SSO configuration not able to sign request. Could you remind ? We need this feature to go into production (see attached image). 

best regards,

Nissar

It would be helpful if there was a way to setup notifications so that it would email Admin whenever a workflow runs longer than a preset amount of time.

Admin would set time threshold for triggering notification i.e. > 15min and Alteryx Server would email Admin whenever a workflow runs longer than that so that they could monitor this specific workflow and take corrective action,