Alteryx Server Ideas

Allow admins to configure an outage window(s) of a specified amount of time (say 5-6pm every sunday) for conducting admin activities. Specifically this outage window would block any scheduled jobs, drive any manual started jobs to queue, and also issue a popup on the gallery to notify users that it's during an outage window. 

When looking at a Workflow in the Gallery there is no way to tell if it currently resides in a collection. As a suggestion, a good place to have this information would be in the header block of a workflow where the version information and number of times a workflow was run is stored.

I have been looking at the content in Alteryx Public Gallery for some time and I have had some concerns about the safety and usability of the macros/workflows in the gallery. 

I think there should be an option to rate, review and provide feedback on stuff that is out there on the public gallery. This will be helpful in many different way.

1. It will generate trust about the workflow/app. If I see that something is rated higher and has been used and commented by a lot of users I am more inclined to use it
2. It will provide a lot of ideas on how a particular workflow/macro can be used in different ways 
3. Review/Feedback will help the author to make changes as required or suggested by users.
4. The macro's will probably show up in google search based on key words provided by users in their reviews.

......

I had initiated a thread some time ago related to this, there is some useful information in there if someone has same concerns.

 https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Connect-Gallery/Can-Apps-and-Macros-in-Alteryx-public-Galle...

Thanks,

Ashish

I would like to see the ability to post comments under workflow information to help with development and elicit feedback. Currently if there is a problem with the macro/workflow you must contact the owner of the workflow directly. It would be nice to leave the creator of the workflow a constructive comment, operating question or a thank you comment. Especially in the Public Gallery where the development time of new version could be reduced for both private individuals looking to share and macros developed by Alteryx that eventually turn into standard tools.

It would be great if i as a developer could create a DB alias connection and for it then to be available to other developers and distributed via the server.

Collaborative working like the above does seem rather limited at the moment.

Currently you can only view the workflow results / history for other users workflows that are scheduled and the schedule is shared in the collection.

A lot of our workflows are set up to run on-demand, some as analytical apps and some as standard workflows. 

The first point of reference when a user experiences an issue should be to view the workflow results, but currently this is not possible and just gives an error "Access Denied" even when the tick box is selected within Workflow settings.

My suggestion is that you should be able to see the workflow results of any workflow that is shared with you (regardless of whether it is scheduled or run on-demand) as this would make fault finding and user support much easier.

Thanks

Rob

As Alteryx makes more and more use of the Public gallery - it would be valuable for Alteryx to explicitly have a section devoted to items that are certified by Alteryx so that we can be safe bringing them into our corporate env.

The assets created by Alteryx are currently listed with Alteryx as the author, however it would be useful to have a completely separate section with Alteryx assets only, and with these broken down by type.

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.

Analytics Gallery needs the ability to save my question choices - so I don't need to re enter them every time I run the app.

In larger organizations or organizations with global coverage, it is possible for users to be in different time zones from each other and the Alteryx server. 

WIth our implementation of Alteryx server, we have the server time zone set to that of our data warehouse, but this time zone is different than my own by -2 hours. In the case of scheduling a workflow in the future, I normally correct for this by setting the scheule in the time zone of the server and things work alright. 

Problem 1:

It falls apart is when I want to schedule something in the future, but it is within the timespan between my time zone and the server time zone. For example: It is 6PM my time, and 4PM server time. I want to schedule a workflow to run at 5PM server time (7PM my time). When I try to set this up with the Version 10 scheduler built into Alteryx desktop, it overides the date field upon saving to run the following day instead of today as it thinks im trying to schedule the run at a time that has already passed (which it has in my timezone, but not in the server time zone). Upon trying to edit this schedule to reset the date to today, it again reverts upon saving.  

The only way I have found to get around this is to reset the time zone of my computer to match the server time zone, then set the schedule, then reset the time zone of my machine back to local time again. This is not the best experience, and will likely be required more frequently for users as their time zone difference increases. 

Problem 2:

When wanting to run something server side immediately (I do this in cases where the runtime will be long, or im mobile and on a machine with a lower amount of processing resources) the "Once" option can be used in scheduler to push something to server and run it. In my case, due to the timezone difference, the default time set when trying to do this is the current time in my time zone, but 2 hours ahead of the current server time.

I have two proposed resolutions:

1) Transmit Server time zone information to the local scheduler to have everything involving scheduling in Server time. Also for any timestamp fields, include the time zone designation so its clear to the user.

2) Use information from the user's machine and information from the server to do timezone conversions behind the scenes so whenever scheduling or viewing schedules, all timestamps are in local time to the user. I feel this is the prefered solution for the best user experience, but would also be the more complex to implement. 

Thanks,

Ryan

Organizations using Alteryx Server with an embedded MongoDB can benefit from an option to change the MongoDB User and Admin User passwords.

Current deployments of Alteryx Server allow regeneration of the Controller Token, and for many of the same reasons, the ability to change the MongoDB passwords would be beneficial to customers.

Many organizations rely on a centralized team for daily administration of the Alteryx Server and MongoDB. With the current functionality, when members of this team change positions, they continue to know the MongoDB authentication information indefinitely. Providing organizations with this capability allows them to make the determination of how/when a change is required to mitigate any risk of misuse.

Currently the Private Gallery product has 2 authentication options - AD and built in. 

If an organization uses AD, this solution is fine, however there are many origanizations who use other standard directory systems. One of the more common directory/authentication systemsis LDAP due to its wide adoption and cross platform compatibility. 

It would be fantastic to have functionality similar to the AD integration, however with LDAP for Gallery authentication and user management. 

Best regards,

Ryan

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)

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.

Suggested information to be included in audit logs.

A secure audit record of all activities on the system:

1. General user access
2. User creates / modifies / archives / deletes data (ie: history on what the user did)
3. Administrator actions

At minimum the logs should include the following:

1. Unique user identifier
2. Unique data subject identifier
3. Function performed by the users
4. Date/time stamp of what was performed by user

I believe many customers could benefit from this type of audit logging, especially those who are required to obtain specific security certifications for their alteryx deployments.  From what I can see online there does not seem to be out of the box functionality for this. If anyone has implemented any type of audit logging like this please feel free to comment.

Thanks

-Vincent

I like to be able to access and run my apps from my iPhone.

A better process Needed for Alteryx Backup and restore.

1. Why do we have to stop the service to do a backup,? We cannot stop a service in Enterprise platform just to do a backup.  we are not able to take backups because our jobs will be running 24X7 We Run jobs on Alteryx Server,
2. All of a Sudden our Windows server crashed and we lost all the data, The backup we have of Mongo DB was not perfectly restored on the new server which breaks the workflow, connections etc  due to encryption....
3. what is the purpose of backup if we cannot restore on a new server in case of DR

Please fix it ASAP,

We would like Gallery admins to be able to add any workflow to a collection - not just the workflows they authored.

The purpose is to have one collection where we have a set of workflows that were reviewed and approved for audits.

Only the reviewer could add to this collection