Alteryx Server Ideas

Hi,

We have more than 100 workflows scheduled in different intervals for a day. Inorder to monitor this we have to manually check in the workflow results if the workflow ran successfully or not. 

Say a workflow is scheduled every 30mins then we have to check this 48times in a day manually in the Gallery results if it ran successfully or not.

Similarly we will have N number of workflows scheduled with different intervals.

We feel its too time consuming to manually verify this.

It will be good if there is a notification when there is a failure in the run, so we can check it only then rather than checking it every 30mins.

I've been writing applications and regularly need to REQUIRE fields for data entry.  When I do, I include ERROR MESSAGES at minimum.  Often I label the field as something like:  Name (Required).  Wouldn't it be nice to have a red star or have the data field in another color for background?  Taking this a step further, the validation rules being activated within the screen (rather than during run) would be awesome.

As long as I'm posting ideas, it would be nice to have an Alteryx supported function to identify the user within the application global variables.  For users, it would make my apps more friendly if they could save their configuration (*.yxwv) in the gallery.  Extending that thought, within my application I would like to be able to have easy access to their responses as well.

My use case for access to the .yxwv file data is that I will repeat some of the fields back to the user within my output.  When needed I will write the responses to a text input tool and format it for display in the output.  That requires an additional action and maintenance within the application.

Just a few application thoughts.

Thanks,

Mark

It would be good to see when a workflow started running on the gallery when looking at Workflow Resuts. 
Currently it only tells you that the worklfow is running. Seeing when it started would be very helpful.

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

As an enhancement to the gallery, I'd like to be able to save my application parameters in the gallery in a similar fashion to when I run an app locally.  Users can view the results of an application run, but can't save the parameters that created the run.  I'll go a step further than this and ask for another enhancement.  I'd like to be able to access the questions & responses within the execution of the app to display them during reporting.t

Use case:

For a list generation application, I need to present to the user the criteria applied during the selection process.

Input Address: 49015

Type of Vehicle: Chevy

Minimum Year: 2010

Maximum Year: 2015

I've got a working solution that is okay, but not very "Alteryx-easy".  I need to have a second update attached to the interface tool to update the user response.

Thanks for your consideration,

Mark

From a security standpoint, it is important that all users are authenticated when accesing the Gallery on Alteryx Server and using local accounts.  There shgould be an option available to force user to the login page rather than the public Gallery.  Users going to the Alteryx server URL should be presented with the login page by default before being taken to the Gallery, rather than seeing the public Gallery and needing to click Sign-in in the upper right corner.

We use the Server API to manage our server environment - and we recently noticed that the Workflows API (/admin/v1/workflows) ignores any canvasses after the 10 000'th submission.

For example:

• If we don't use any offsets or limits - then we get 10 000 applications
• If we use an offset of 5000 with a limit of 10000 - we get 5000 applications (i.e. anything after canvas 10 000 is being ignored)
• if we use an offset of 9990 with a limit of 100 - we get 10 rows returned (i.e. anything after canvas 10 000 being ignored)

By querying Mongo directly (appinfos collection) we know that we have 18 800 or so unique applications in our environment.

Please can you remove this cap from the API so that it can be used to query any number of canvasses on a larger environment?

cc: 

+  @Hemanth @marydest24 @Shreyasi @Sotoll @Kosi @revathi @Bethanyturner012  @TanyaS 

Could the community receive a comprehensive data dictionary of all the collections in Mongo with:

- Description of each collection

- Description of each attribute (or field) within each collection

- Documentation of joins between the collections

A great example can be seen in how Tableau documents their postgresSQL tables: https://help.tableau.com/current/server/en-us/data_dictionary.htm

This would be extremely helpful as we are determining which collections we need to store, how to construct queries and how to build analytics on our assets. 

Thank you!

We spent almost a full day on Friday internally, and also about 3 or 4 hours of time for 3 Alteryx Server engineers (thank you all - MattH; ZachH; WayeW) and Ben Burkholder trying to get our gallery server to start.

Error message was "

Failed to construct Gallery daemon process, process exited code <9002>

This was all that was provided in the server log files; the gallery log files; and the Windows Event Viewer.

In the end, it turned out that the issue was very simple - the MongoDB had open locks in place that needed to be deleted; and then the service came up immediately.

Several man-days of our effort; as well as the precious time of the Alteryx Engineers who gave up their Friday afternoon to help could have all been avoided if the error-message on the server failure said "Login failure on server due to open locks - please clean out locks on db.locks collection" with a link to the solution or a lookup code that be researched on the Alteryx support site.     

Please could we go through the server service and eliminate all the exit codes and replace with human-friendly error messages - that way we could allow this kind of issue to be self-diagnosed, and allow the Alteryx Engineers to spend their time building the next generation of Alteryx Server rather than diagnosing a table lock.

cc: @avinashbonu @revathi @Deeksha @BenBu @WayneWooldridge @MattH @stevea @ZachH 

On the workflow results window, I'd like to see a column for "Start Time". If I have a workflow that is running, I'd like to know what time it started running so I have an idea on when it might finish.

Alteryx Server does not presently support any file encryption systems. Many people need to encrypt there Fileshare as a secure measurement and use safeguard lan encrypted. Please provide a solution so workers are able to read and write encrypted files through safeguard lan encrypted.

Please support SAML 2.0 for gallery

Currently, DCM credentials appear to only be used in combination with a DCM Data Source.  

For ease of use for my end users (non-Designers), I would like my end users to be able to save a user ID and password as a standalone DCM credential.  Then, I want the user to have the option to select that credential for use in two places:

1.  Run-As - when running a workflow on demand, the user should be able to choose their saved DCM credential.
2. Credential injection into Input Data or other relevant tools in Analytic Apps - I want to use the DCM Connection tool to build Analytic Apps that prompt my users to select their DCM Credential (NOT a full DCM Connection with data source - I don't want my users to have to set that up.)  When the user selects their Credential, their user ID and password should be securely encrypted and inserted into the existing connection set up by the App designer.

Having this functionality would remove administrative burden from both our Designers and the end users they support.

It would be really useful to be able to obtain the user name of some one running an app in the Gallery. This could be used for instance in row level security for people running an app that produces a report and that data is considered sensitive

Hello,

We recently upgraded our on-prem instance of Alteryx Server/Gallery to version: -

• Client: 2020.1.0
• Server: 2021.3.3.63061
• Server Binaries: 2021.3.3.63061
• Service Layer
• Master: 2021.3.3.63061

We have noticed that the search functionality in various areas (top and right-side) no longer return results using a "contains" but rather it is doing an "exact" or "starts with" keyword search. This is very frustrating to many users as we can't easily find our workflows quickly compared to previous versions.

Please improve search functionality.

The current Alteryx user interface is displayed in a vertical orientation without the option for customization. To optimize space efficiency, it would be highly advantageous if the filters could be arranged horizontally, as depicted in the attached figure.

Additionally, there is a usability issue with the options list for interface tools like the list box. Currently, all options are displayed without utilizing a dropdown, requiring users to scroll extensively when multiple tools with numerous options are present within a single analytic app. Implementing a dropdown functionality for improved navigation would significantly enhance the overall user experience.

We are hoping to move to Mongo Enterprise as the backend for our Alteryx server, however we may not be able to given that Alteryx does not currently support Kerberos & Keytab authentication.    

Please could you add this to the server so that larger clients with Enterprise Mongo can scale upwards?

cc: @avinashbonu @DamianA @BenBu @Deeksha

Although the connectivity to the eMail infrastructure is set up on the controller and worker nodes - there is no ability to set up automated alerting for errors on workflows from the server.

We would like to be able to set up the gallery as follows:

- Every job is owned by a user or a distribution list

- If that workflow throws an error or warning (this should be configurable on the server, whether warnings are included), then the author should be e-mailed with a link to the specific workflow and the error log.

This can be done in a round-about way, by running an error-reporting alteryx job after the fact - but this kind of alert needs to go out almost immediately given our dependance on Alteryx for specific SLAs.

cc: @avinashbonu ; @Deeksha ; @revathi

Currently the Gallery's Admin API is a bit light on functionality. It only works with data connections & workflows and not regular server admin functions. Endpoints I'd love to see, but not limited to, are:

• Create/modify/diable users
• Create/modify/delete subscriptions (including assigning users to subscriptions)
• Job status
• Add/modify/delete workflow schedules