Alteryx Server Ideas

We have at the moment our server configured to work with SAML credentials. Whenever a user sets the credentials option to be "User must specify own credentials" the validation is performed using the servers own local user, giving out an error whenever some workflows with SSO data access are uploaded.

It would be great if a window would pop up or credentials could be configured for the validation to aviod seeing the error to show up.

In Gallery, I'd like to see the execution log in the workflow results, i.e. what you get if you run the workflow from Designer.  I'd like to see this whatever the status of the workflow completion.  Would be useful to assess warnings and the performance of components within the workflow.  Also would give me useful stats about records loaded etc.

For large implementations of Alteryx - you'd want to have a live control-center view that allows you to see:

- The state of health of all the server components

- the depth of the queue in the controller

- Jobs failing vs. succeeding.

While this can be done by running alteryx jobs, and by going and looking for problems - what we'd want is to have a heads-up control center view which is self-refreshing all the time so that administrators can be notified when there are issues.    And this should not be e-mail notification (it's too easy to miss an e-mail or an SNMP alert)

Think about a 40 inch monitor on a wall (like in a traffic control center)  that allows the server management team to see the state of health of the plant at a glance, and dive into issues without having to constantly be looking for them.    this is a critical capability for enterprise install-base and would be a very useful capability to add to the platform.

On far too many occasions I have been working on a workflow in designer with either the outputs disabled via the configuration or using containers (preventing file creation/updating during testing) and I would save them back up to server without remembering to re-enable these outputs, which causes lots of issues down the line when users are trying to access these processes.

A simple warning on loading to the gallery that there are disabled tools and what tool id they are would mitigate this issue.

Sometimes a schedule is enabled that we want to disable. We edit the schedule, click the button to disable the schedule, click "Save". Then refresh the page and it's enabled still. The schedule will not disable in some cases. In the cases where it does get disabled, clicking the "Save" button appears to have no action. There's no confirmation and the screen stays static. Two suggestions:

• Have some UI response confirming that the changes have been saved.
• Provide an error message with explanation when the changes can't be saved (or just fix the bug)

I would like the ability to add a workflow description on Alteryx server.  This step would be done after the workflow is published, this way future edits can be made without having to republish the workflow.  A checkbox to allow HTML content would also be appreciated.

Alteryx has its own version control built in - however in large Enterprise environments there is a requirement to be able to use the version control platform that already exists.

In other words - when you install the server - you are asked:

Do you want to use Alteryx for version control, or your own SVN; GIT or a 4th custom option based on API integration (i.e. build this yourself based on a defined API).

This is very important to ensure that enterprise assets are maintained under the regimen of control that our Infosec & Auditors need, and the investment in making sure that Version Control contains all the right discipline; governance; etc - is all done in the enterprise Version Control platform.

Can we please extend Alteryx to have this flexibility so that we can cater to large Enterprise customers, and also anyone else who has a strict governance & change control requirement with existing infrastructure already in place?

If this is built as an independant layer and separated out from the core server slightly - it will be possibly to flexibly add other VC systems later (or provide companies with the ability to build their own).

Thank you

Sean

+ @Deeksha @BenBu @avinashbonu @revathi

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.

Special characters cannot be accommodated when searching usernames or workflows in the Gallery and Admin UI pages.

Everyone on our team would benefit from having access to each other's workflows -- including workflow results and scheduling -- but publishing them to gallery where any user in the company can run it/ download it would present a security issue. Functionality that is not met with Collections. I found a similar idea, but not anything that encompasses the whole thing.

It would be of immense value to have a Team Gallery - something intermediate to the company gallery and the private collection. This would enable our team to have access to modify, publish, schedule workflows as a team.

This idea is to allow users to configure the file view option for a workflow running in the gallery that produces file outputs. Today, there are two views that a user can toggle between (see attachment), but I don't believe there's a way to change the default view. This idea is to change the setting as either a global gallery setting, on a workflow-by-workflow basis, or both.

We have end users that miss the drop down menu (and the file count next to the drop down, and the label we've added in the analytic app that says there will be two output files, and...), so they sometimes miss the second file entirely. Setting the default view to the "list view" rather than the drop down view could help alleviate that pain.

Note: The screenshots in the attachment show two Excel files that could be combined into one file with multiple tabs. This is a pain point for other workflows, as well, that produce outputs in multiple file formats.

When a user publishes and schedules a workflow on the gallery, they have the option to specify their time zone to ensure that the execution of the workflow occurs at the appropriate time. However, if the workflow invokes the DateTimeNow() function, the captured time is in UTC. If it is important for the end-user to have that time that is captured be in their local time zone, they will need to manually (either within the workflow or as a user input for an Analytic App) specify the offset from UTC.

Instead, there should be an Engine variable that captures the offset (or the time zone) that the workflow was executed from (or scheduled in), which can dynamically adjust the DateTimeNow() output appropriately.

Today the v3 api requires curator access.  V3 has Getters that should work for users with API permission.  The Getter should return the objects that user has access to.   Example:   GetCredentials for a normal user with API access should return credentials that the user has access to.  Today they get a 401 auth error.

We don't want to make these users curators just to let them access the V3 api.

My team utilizes the Gallery API extensively and have found that we have processes that the API has listed as actively running, but cannot be found via the Controller's GUI.  As a gallery artisan, I can call flows via API, but cannot cancel these executions unless I reach out to the administrator group to kill them manually. 

It would be extremely helpful to add an endpoint with the ability to submit a specific job GUID and have the server/controller kill the execution of that flow and clear up the server capacity.  This could then be scheduled on a regular basis as a maintenance  task to keep the server clean.

Thanks

Hello,

I've used a standard configuration to set up an Alteyx server. The gallery is available at https://alteryx.samplecompany.com/gallery

I'd would be really helpful if you enable to create a landing page at https://alteryx.samplecompany.com/ and add a possibility to host add extra pages. The easiest way to do this is to add an option to the Alteryx Server configuration wizard and read the pages from Alteryx workspace location.

Additionally, such landing page should have redirection from HTTP to HTTPs.

Best,

Piotr

The current Gallery API executes a job until it reaches a completion state with either success or failure.  Once reaching that state, the callout to /v1/jobs/{jobId}/ will return an array of messages that can then be parsed to gather information about the execution of the job, similar to the output you see in designer or via the CLI when running a job directly.

It would be nice if the callout to the jobs endpoint would constantly update and return the messages array with each callout.  With jobs that take longer to execute, our Gallery API wrapper could then report back to us and let us know what messages have come out as the jobs runs.  For example, if a process takes 2 hours to execute, we might want to know how far along the job is or if it has met a special condition that will cause it to run longer, etc.  To do that, we could add in message tools that report info messages to us.  Unfortunately, these messages are ineffective if we are running via the API because we won't see them until the job has fully completed.

Hi,

We have more clients that would like to prioritize their scheduled jobs based on run time and importance. 

It could be a simple priority number, that decides which job that need to run next. Further it could be nice to be able to allocate certain workers to certain jobs. 

I am looking forward to your feedback.

Daniel

in the current alteryx gallery if we need to disable of enable the schedules workflows we need to manually enable or disable them.

example if we have 100 scheduled workflow. and we want to disable all of them and then enable them later. currently we spend hours to manually disable and enable each of them.

By adding a feature to select the workflows in scheduled to enable of disable the selected one at one which will save hours of time.

As per design Alteryx Server retains all FAILED jobs in the Queue and Results collections even when we set the server to keep run history and results for x days

Purging records from Designer involves manual activity

Proposing the idea of purging these error records through automation script:

Step 1: Stop Alteryx Server

Step 2: Backup Mongo DB

Step 3: Replace big size files: AS_ResultsFiles.Files.bson, AS_Results.bson, AS_ResultsFiles.bson, AS_Queue.bson with Empty .bson files of same name in the backup/AlteryxService

Step 4: restore MongoDB from the backup (with the replaced files

Step 5: restart Alteryx service.