Alteryx Server Ideas

I have been trying to scan all of the workflows that are stored in the gallery and wrote this community post about it. Some Alteryx employees reached out to me directly to see if they could help solve my problem. We ended up with a somewhat wonky roundabout solution (that I haven't implemented yet) by downloading yxzp files through the Gallery API, unzipping them, then scanning the workflows as xml. I think the process could be greatly simplified if Alteryx had a set of Introspective tools.

The introspective tools would use similar, if not the same, processes that Alteryx already has in place to pull data from the gallery/server itself. The set of tools would be most useful for Server admins or people that are trying to build meta-workflows for Alteryx to make things easier for their users. Similar to the solution to my problem above, most of this functionality can be worked around by querying the Mongo and/or scanning engine logs. The Introspective tools would simplify this process greatly, especially when it comes to joining records from the Mongo and collecting workflow-internal data.

Since the tools will have direct access to the gallery/server it would make sense that they would only be available to machines with server licensing or could be made available if the user has a high enough permission level in the gallery they are trying to obtain data from.

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

One of the issues that we have with Alteryx jobs in prod (and also Tableau, coincidentally) is that often a canvas is built to serve a need at the time, but after a while it's no-longer needed but it continues to run and consume server resources.

Can we add the option to our server environment to request recertification that a particular job is still needed every X months.

This will achieve 2 useful purposes:

- if the job is no-longer needed then the user hits "No thank you" and it's then taken off the scheduler which reduces server loads

- Alternatively - the user may realize that this should have been handed over to a new team or owner, and they can then make this change based on the recertification prompt.

I'm pretty certain that this would help to manage the inevitable build-up that happens on server environments where jobs build up until the server starts thrashing and the admin team then need to go out to all the users to do this recert process manually.

CC:  @rijuthav; @jithinmony; @HengHe; @RajK; @ydmuley; @revathi; @Deeksha; @MPistone; @Ari_Fuller; @Arianna_Fuller; @JoshKushner; @samN; @avinashbonu; @Sunder_Sriram; @Rahul_Thakur; @Rahul_Singh

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

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

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

We have the Local License Server installed.  Right now, if a Designer user changes roles, or leaves the company, they have to release their license from their client-side machine.  If they don't release it properly, and IT can't get us into their machines, then we have to wait 7 days for that license to roll off the server.  There should be a way for a system admin to forcefully revoke someone's license.

It would be nice to be able to change the Gallery URL from:

• http://localhost/gallery/
• http://alteryx.mycompany.ca/gallery/

to:

• http://localhost/
• http://alteryx.mycompany.ca/

The reason being to make it easier for end users to find the server/content.

Original forum post here: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Knowledge-Base/Changing-the-Gallery-URL-on-Alteryx-S...

Please support GZIP files in input tool in Server. This is related to https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Support-for-GZIP-gz-compressed-files-in-input..., but logged in a separate Idea because the staff indicated in the thread that they are planning support for GZIP in Designer only in 2018.2. We need it in Server as well.

I have Designer Apps that work really well using the Browse tool to provide the outputs to display and download in the Apps.

This does not work when I push the Apps to Server.

I find this very restricting and would like to suggest that the Browse Tool be enable to generate its outputs in Server Apps.

I would like the Browser outputs to be enabled for download into Excel, PDF, etc as well so the Server Apps behave in a similar way to the same Apps in Designer.

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

I would like to see some functionality in the Alteryx Gallery in which you can select multiple schedule workflows to disable/enable. Currently as an admin if I have many schedules I need to enable/disable I need to go into each schedule manually to disable or enable. This is okay for one or two, but I have about 20-30, it is very time consuming. I would like to see maybe some checkbox functionality next to the workflow to select and then an option to either disable all selected or enable all selected.

It is currently (Alteryx Server 2018) not possible to delete Districts one created - we can only disable them. See also: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Connect-Gallery/Deleting-Gallery-Districts/m-p/32684

Frankly, this is rather inconvenient if one wants to restructure a Gallery. Renaming them is an option, but there might still be a number of districts we want to delete. Would appreciate if this could be considered for a future update.

When a workflow is run manually in the gallery the user is able to enter input parameters. However when using the schedule functionality this option is not available and a separate workflow needs to be developed to dynamically derive input parameters. Effectively two separate versions of the workflow need to be created and maintained.

If this functionality could be built into a future version of Alteryx this would be of significant benefit.

Isn't it great that we can toggle between outputs from an app in the Gallery, being able to view and download each one? Yes! However, what if an app produces a lot of outputs...such as 1 per state...or 1 per product type...or 1 per month...etc. What is get is something like this:

Now imagine how long it would take to download all of these...ouch. I recommend Alteryx add a "Download All" button to the page that appears after an app finishes running.

Related Community Post here.

Hello Alteryx team, 

I would like to propose idea that was mentioned on the community but there is no solution either.

It was mentioned at https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Data-Cleansing-tool-suddenly-stopped-w...

The issue is related to Qlik Analytics Samples and error that it is causing with wrong path error for default macros like eg.CountRecords.

For professional alteryx admins - it is important to know if a particular asset has been updated (so that we can bring the updated version into our env), with some idea of release notes so that we can understand if the update breaks backward compatibiity and what has been changed.

Additionally - it would be very helpful for admins to be able to be notified of new assets created by particular authors whom I trust.