Alteryx Server Ideas

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)

Dearest colleageues and comrades (Romans, countrymen?):

Have you ever queued up your jobs only to have them block your regularly scheduled programming? Imagine a world where, assuming you had multiple worker nodes, you can direct and prioritise your jobs on your terms.

This is what I am suggesting.

I've recently worked with Alteryx support, and they turned me on to a QoS setting in Alteryx Server settings. Peep this like a marshmallow chick in hot pink: 

After learning from the great Server Master Kevin Powney (blessed be his name), I learnt that there are currently 3 'channels' that this QoS variable governs. 0 is the highest priority used for workflows. 4 is used for chained apps. 6 is used for gallery service requests.

This will not do.

Why? Well, for one: hello arcane/memorisation.

Secondly, where is my control? I'm a millenial dammit! Service me!

So, my idea, that I want you to vote so highly on as to save yourself any myself a lot of hassle, is to allow a custom QoS variable to be a traffic variable. And here's how it works:

• For each workflow/app, you can assign it whatever QoS/traffic variable you choose. 
• This allows the user the power to control which 'lane' is clogged in the queue.

Example time! [cheers, candy thrown]

In my current situation, we have some jobs that are network-intensive (database calls), and jobs that are processing-intensive (CPU hogs doing hard-core maths). 

The network-intensive jobs run on the weekends so that we have the data in the morning on Monday. The processing-intensive jobs need to finish, but suck up all the CPU power. For the last couple of weeks, we've unsuccessfully run these jobs over the weekend. The downside is that since we cannot control how traffic flows (and we only have the 0/4/6 options in QoS, of which these only fit in the 0 lane [breath, sorry]) the CPU-heavy jobs have blocked more critical network jobs.

If we had two paths, we could assign the CPU jobs to lane 1 and the network jobs to lane 0 and they can run in parallel. And then my boss is happy. We like happy bosses, right?

Vote this up! My boss is awesome!

Thanks for your ear,

Hail Caesar or something.

-Cedric

As an Admin, I would like to be able to see, from the Gallery, a single place where the history of workflows that have been run is displayed.  Right now I can only see workflows running or queued.  I would like to be able to look back at past executions and see status, runtime, errors, etc.

This data is currently available in Designer on our Alteryx Server.  But right now our system is just one environment.  I'm not sure if when we expand to multiple Gallery and Worker machines where I will have to look for workflow history.

Also, Workflow schedules can only be seen in Gallery, and not Designer.  So it would be nice to have everything in one place.

Insights should work like Apps. We should be able to publish insights then grant permission to other people/studios to access the visualizations. I have many clients / users that can benefit from having access to the Insights i'm gathering from Alteryx. 

Rather than schedule to put things on the 5th day or the 14th day of a month, we often want to schedule our flows to run on the 5th business day or the 14th business day. I know that the term 'business day' means different things in different parts of the world, but I think it would be a feature that many reporting-oriented departments would enjoy. Let people specify a formula or have a table to go off of for their definition of 'business day' and it should be easy to implement.

I would add a <scheduler> label to this but there isn't one.

Allow the artisan to turn off the ability of a member to download app results.  Some of the information is highly confidential, and we don't want them to be able to easily print out a list of this information and have that list "floating around".  Or take sensitive client data with them to another job if they leave us and use that to profit their new employer.

After a job is run on Alteryx Server, Gallery lists Job Results with a Status column containing with one of 2 values:

• Error (represented by a red exclamation point icon); and
• Success (represented by a green checkmark icon).
  See attached screenshot for illustration.

If any WARNING messages are generated by the workflow, the operator/user is unaware unless they take the time to expand the message log details, then scroll through the long list of messages that typically appear in the log.

Because the Success Icon appears whether there are Warnings or not, the user must dutifully spend extra time scrolling through the list looking for Warnings even if there are none to be found.

My Idea: provide additional information under the Status column in one or more of these ways:

1. add a 3rd status option with a yellow/orange icon that indicates if/when 1 or more warnings are present
   • This should be a quick/easy enhancement that would provide immediate value
     
     
2. append one or more numbers after the Icon to indicate counts (see mock-up example)
   • There seems to be ample space for this type of info
   • This could be done at a later date as a subsequent enhancement

I think that the user would benefit from a filter where they could focus on errors, warnings, or other types of messages in the same spirit as the Designer interface, but I recognize that would be a lot of work and I am not asking for that now.

Hello all,

According to https://openlineage.io/ 

An open framework for data lineage collection and analysis

Data lineage is the foundation for a new generation of powerful, context-aware data tools and best practices. OpenLineage enables consistent collection of lineage metadata, creating a deeper understanding of how data is produced and used.

 
This is typically the open standards needed for lineage analysis and I think it will become more and more a differenciator with your competitors. As of today, DBT or Apache Airflow already supports it (as producer), Egeria or Marquez already support it (as consumer) and guys from Datahub are working on it  (as consumers)https://feature-requests.datahubproject.io/p/openlineage
So I think Alteryx should implement this standard API as a producer, it's the next big thing in Data Governance and you don't want to stay behind !

Best regards,

Simon

Most companies work on a period level basis and that is every 4 weeks.  There is no way in Alteryx currently to schedule workflows to run only every 4 weeks, the monthly options do not match this cadence.  If the option was added to select "every X week(s) on X day" this would also encompass biweekly scheduling as well.  Outlook currently has exactly what would be needed (screenshot attached.)

Hi all,

I would like to suggest the idea to make the ability to add a graphic to an Interface on the server as well. 

Currently, the function only seems to work on Desktop, but having it work on the Gallery as well would be very nice.

Especially if we could have the image be horizontally oriented as well as vertically, depending on our other interface tools. 

Would love to hear any other related comments or ideas!

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.

Apologies for posting this in the community ideas forum - couldn't find a better location.

There are a rich collection of Alteryx Tools which are housed in the public Gallery - and a sub-set of these are created by and certified by Alteryx.   Could we provide a mechanism to filter to only show these Alteryx Certified assets so that we can see which have the high level of trust?

Many thanks

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

I am in the process of migrating apps from the old gallery to the new. I have screen captures of the results from the same app in both. In the older gallery version, if there is only a single file type available, it defaults to that file type and you click the icon for the type. In the new gallery version, you must select a file type before you can download the file, even if there is only a single type available. The dropdown makes sense for one that you have multiple types (like pcxml), but it makes no sense to require the user to go through an extra step to select a type before downloading when that's the only type they can download. Please see all the screen captures. The blue-ish background is from the new gallery.

The WebDAV protocol isn't supported by the Alteryx Scheduler,  due to the security constraints associated with connecting to SharePoint.  This is a server side limitation that should be aligned with the ability of the desktop to preform the WebDAV action.  

It's been mentioned previously but I haven't seen an official idea posted. The width of the "Name" column on the Collections page needs to be adjustable to allow users to see the full name. Since we have many distinct areas, we use naming conventions to help organize different groups' Collections. But, even as short as we try to keep it the full names don't appear most of the time. At the very least, increase the default width because cutting the names off after 24 characters is simply too short.

Can we have search option enabled in Gallery Admin > Jobs to filter on running jobs to specific ones or to check specific job schedules.

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.

In stead of having to create an event to notify me when workflows are failing, I would like to easily enable that option from gallery after scheduling a workflow.