Alteryx Server Ideas

When you enable SAML authentication for Alteryx Server it does allow Single Sign IN but it does not support Sign OUT. This means that after you close your browser the session remains active. If the browser is opened again and the Gallery page is loaded it will pick up the session that was activated before instead of creating a new session. At the very least a session time out limit should be added.

Hey Team,

With 2020.3, the new Groups feature came into light, which is great, but seems like it was only half-thought.

It would have been nicely complemented with some API endpoints that would allow managing the groups' members - add, remove, list members, etc.

Seems like the API on Alteryx is like 100 steps behind and seems like the new developments are not considering adding APIs for the new released features. I feel this is a product roadmap issue.

As an admin, I would like far more ways to automate managing the Server/Gallery than the ones currently provided by Alteryx.

Integration with AD would be nice as well, we use SAML, and would like to have the option to import AD groups that would sync automatically in Alteryx - same way Tableau has those groups that are imported directly from AD.

Thanks,

Alex

The default view at gallery home page time will not support long titles for your workflows.  I have several that get cut off with . . . . . and you need to hover over in order to get the full title.  You can select a list view, which helps, and gives you more metadata, but you have no mechanism to save your table / list view as a default.  Administrators should have the option to define a default view (tabular / list) and have it default that way for everyone who gets there, authenticated or not. 

If you goto a private studio, you get the list view option.  If you go to a collection, you get the list view option. If you goto a district, you don't get a list / table option set, just table set.  Why? 

There does not seem to be a way to set a (list of) favorite(s), even as an administrator.  There should be a quick-hit button option to get you there, add it to a favorites collection, something.  It seems like we went a long way to generate three different builds of ways to organize workflows, but left out the one that is most universal in similar tools.  'My favorites'.  

The search criteria for adding a workflow to a collection *mandates* that you have a space, but doesn't tell you that is why you are not getting any hits; i.e., 'Water' and 'Water ' will give you 'no results found', or anything with water in the title respectively.  Ugh.  

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.

Alteryx has the power (no pun intended), and Power BI has the visualizations.

But, why use two interfaces when you could use one?

A concept we started kicking around was embedding a PowerBI.com visualization into the Alteryx Gallery.

In theory this should work, but we're interested to hear if anyone else has tried it or has a best practice for embedding links into Gallery reports.

It should be possible to take the dashboard link:

Then, drop that into a text input tool to have it embedded in the output.

The idea is that certain dashboards would be linked to certain report results to allow an end user to drill into the output of the Gallery report specific to each result output, thus creating an interactive drill down in one interface.

Thoughts?  Ideas?

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.

When sending an app to the Gallery, in the Asset Management window, it would be nice to have a "check all" and "check none" box.  

Hello,

This issue relates to an inability to input data from a database where access to only certain columns is permitted. This is due to PII data being present in the data.

I am trying to pull data from one table at a time using the standard ‘Input Data’ tool. 

As I do not have table level access I am explicitly specifying the column names and not using a wildcard. Please see the example below, query highlighted in yellow and the returned error in red. You will see the error message returned from Alteryx suggests a * wildcard has been used despite specifying the exact fields to pull.

Several of the Ford GDIA team and Ford HPC team have reviewed this with me and cannot assist. The HPC team believe it is a bug in Alteryx which has been reported by other users internally, that is ‘Select *’ commands being sent from Alteryx despite specific columns being outlined in the query to the data lake. As we only have access to specific fields within Ranger (due to PII data) the select * fails and returns an error.

I can confirm my ODBC connections are all set correctly as I can pull from certain tables where I have full table level access but not others. Access rights are all in place as I can use the same query on Ambari without issue.

Thank you for any assistance you can provide,

Michael Higgins

Example Query

Select STATION_ID, STATION_DESC from dsc60082_qlscm_tz_db.qlsc_station limit 10

Info: Input Data (3): ODBC Driver version: 03.80

Error: Input Data (3): Error SQLPrepare: [Hortonworks][Hardy] (97) Error occurred while trying to get table schema from server. Error: [Hortonworks][Hardy] (80) Syntax or semantic analysis error thrown in server while executing query. Error message from server: Error while compiling statement: FAILED: HiveAccessControlException Permission denied: user [mhiggi37] does not have [SELECT] privilege on [dsc60082_qlscm_tz_db/qlsc_station/*]

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Hi Michael,

I believe it would require turning off the queries we currently run to retrieve metadata and retrieving metadata only for the columns selected in the query.

Please submit to our Idea Center for consideration.  Thanks!

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Angela Ogle | Customer Support Engineer

As a system admin, I need a simple, reliable way to back up the Alteryx Server without shutting it down first. A hot-backup (and restore) utility that includes a consistent copy of MongoDB plus any other server config files would allow me to do this.

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.

Not sure if this has already been suggested but I couldn't find it in the ideas...

It would be awesome if in the Gallery some better documentation could be created for the naming of the different private studios, collections, and districts. The naming causes some confusion because it is so different than most other products which causes confusion in our company.

HI All, 

In the Gallery Page under My Workspace-->Share With Me we could see the fields like Name, Type, Owner, Shared Source, Uploaded, Manual Runs. Among these we are not able to sort the fields "Type" and "Owner" alphabetically, whereas we are able to sort the other fields Name, Shared Source, Uploaded, Manual Runs accordingly. Kindly refer the attached snapshot. 

Regards, 

Ariharan R

Please keep in mind that this is a suggestion from a container novice! 🙂

However, our situation is such that our release upgrade deployments are taking significant time to install, test and sign-off from DEV through PROD for the four main life-cycles involved in our server environment. Even if we script the deployment to save time, there's still manual configuration needed to confirm the new version works in the next server environment.

Similar to how Promote can deploy from DEV through PROD using images/containers, my suggestion is to package the Server components into images/containers that can be similarly deployed through the life-cycles. While the container with mongoDB doesn't need to move to the next life-cycle, the containers with the web server, load balancer, and engine nodes could move with the click of a button. And if needed, reverted to prior version with similar ease.

I forgot to ask about this idea at the UX lab during Inspire, but would be very happy to hear if it's already in the pipeline!

Thank you for your consideration!

Hi,

Currently for most of our workflows we are using our private Alteryx Server to run workflows, using executables that call alteryxenginecmd and output logs to dynamically created log files.  However, there is currently no way to leverage a custom log location for a workflow that is run directly from the Alteryx Gallery (apart from sending an email, which has scalability problems).

I would like an option to create the output log as part of a workflow, so that when we save that workflow to the Gallery, it can output a log with a dynamic name easily.

The AlteryxService addtoqueue command is great, but it leaves me wanting more.  My simple use case is to run WorkflowB via the addtoqueue command in an after run event from WorkflowA, which is run daily.  The result is that i end up with a cluttered scheduler with many instances of WorkflowB that i need to manually clean up, since addtoqueue creates a new record in AS_Applications each time it runs

It would be useful if there was an AlteryxService command for each of the subroutines already built in to the scheduler front end app: schedule workflow, update workflow, add workflow, remove workflow, edit schedule, etc

MongoDB objects could be identified by oid which the user can get from querying the AlteryxService database

I don't want to rebuild what you've already built, just need a little more control over it 🙂

This is a real flaw in the product (almost a bug), you cannot search for a schedule.  We have about 150 jobs scheduled to run daily.  If you want to amend the schedule you have to page next through all the schedules to find it.  If you search for the workflow name, you get the workflow screen which does not contain a link to the schedules.

Also add a link to the schedules for each job on the workflow page.  I.e. search for job ABC, see that it has 3 different schedules associated with it and be able to edit, or delete any of its schedules.

Our team is still fairly new to the Gallery, so if there's something existing that I'm missing, I'd be glad to hear it.

I recently found the following thread : http://community.alteryx.com/t5/Publishing-Gallery/Get-App-User-name-at-Run-TIme/m-p/775/highlight/t...

Which included a text box input with a title of "_cloud:UserID".  I was able to use this to pull in things such as the users login information, email address, etc.

I would like to be able to use a function similar to this in order to generate user-specific usage reports, or dynamically update a "Send Email" tool with the email of the running user.

However, when I inquired about this "_cloud:UserID" API call, I was told that it is an undocumented and unsupported call.

Ideally, I'd like an application/macro tool that does something similar - which takes the user's credentials automatically from the gallery and runs the Application based on those credentials.  This could modify Emails or filter the output of the Workflow.  I'm sure there are other use cases as well.  I think having an officially supported tool to manage this would allow for a wide variety of dynamic applications on the gallery.

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.

There needs to be a means for Server Admins to delete/clean up subscriptions and users from the system.

Ref: https://help.alteryx.com/server/11.0/admin/index.htm#Administration/Users.htm%3FTocPath%3DAdminister..., “To revoke a user's access to Gallery, deactivate their user account. You cannot delete a Gallery user's account.”

While testing with version 11.0, default permissions set to NO ACCESS, Security using Windows Active Directory, I gave the gallery URL to a random teammate to see what they could access.  While permissions prevented the individual from most activities, the server still created a USER and SUBSCRIPTION for the individual.  Once testing was completed, there was no means possible to clean up these entries., or at least to do more than set them to NO ACCESS.

For most enterprise applications, it is common practice to be able to purge a user account from a system if they are no longer a member of the company.