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.

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.

Idea:

To create an IoT district for the Alteryx Gallery...

Rationale:

Many vendors are now focusing on the IoT wave,

having some examples on IoT use cases would be a nice resource for many...

• Please star the idea if you like it,
• Comments are more than welcome

Best

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.

It would be GREAT if we could have an optional notes field in the gallery. When many tools are uploaded to a collection, the titles alone are not descriptive enough for end users. I have to publish a separate "menu" for reports that are available in the gallery. In some cases I have to number them. I wish users could just browse for themselves to find the application that is suitable for their use case. 

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.

I think it would be good to arranged the Workflow results into tabbed pages by completion status, e.g. a tab for failures, warnings, success, all.  We run about 200 jobs in the morning and have to page through all the workflow results to find failures.  

Also would be useful to search workflow results by completion status, e.g. find all workflows that have failed.

I know that the documentation shows that you can setup a worker to a specific QoS so that it will only pick up work for a particular workflow or app, but there could be a greater use for it.

For example if the Admin could control what QoS means for each definition.

I.E. Application, vs a workflow that runs over an hour, vs in-database tools. Then it will allow the admins to self guide where the work is going.

Right now there is only three levels

• Normal workflow execution: QOS = 0
• Chained application execution: QOS = 4 (all apps in the chain aside from the last)
• Workflow validation requests: QOS = 6

This was great for Alteryx public, but for private Galleries we need to distribute the work better than FIFO.

Currently , once a user have SetPriority access ,he can select from Low, Medium, High or Critical priority levels to ensure certain jobs always take priority over others.  

This feature can be misused as users can upgrade their priority levels to jump up the queue and later downgrade the levels. It's difficult to justify and ask each others when you have 1000+ jobs running in a day and it makes administration tough and gives unbiased Gallery to all end users.

It would be nice to have on Admin console, global option to set max priority level so that no user can jump up level beyond this.

As Alteryx Admin, we want to understand what our users are doing in their workflows as much as possible to ensure best user experience. In order to do this we would like to scan through User workflow XML in order to breakdown everything going on. We understand that their are many posts on workflows already doing a lot of this but:

Our Ask:  is to release XML DTD or similar documentation that can help us breakdown workflows at individual tool levels (as well as differences between tool versions)

This would allow us to further build out solutions to admin visibility of user workflows.

In prior projects (before the gallery started acting more like a management console (still would like to see a few more features there too ;) ) , we were able to automate the deployment of the workflows. But there's no good way to automate the deployment of the schedules.

The best I've heard is doing a complete dump of the mongo instance on the lower environment and moving that file and ultimately restoring that to the prod environment (messy).

Even using the Gallery, there will still need to be an admin who goes through the process of setting up schedules to deployed apps. 

There should be a REST call to export and import schedules of apps from one environment to the next within the gallery. 

Best,

dK

I would like the ability to add Groups to a collection as well as individual users. This would make things a lot easier for situations where large sets of users needed to be added to a collection at once, or removed at once.

Within the Mongo database on the Alteryx Server, when using WinAuth,  if you use AD Groups for Permssioning, there is no direct way within the Mongo database to go from the AD Group to the User table.  This is important if you need to report on who, base upon their AD group membership with their associated role is a user.  Example.  AD Group 'Example-AD -Group'  is assigned Permission Curator.  The AD Group contains user 'Jay Smith'.  'Jay Smith'  is on the user Collection.  activeDirectoryPermssions Collection  contains the Ad Groups and permissions.  But,  in order to connect the two collections,  you will need to go externally to define the AD Group memebership to join these two collections together.

*This is an idea from @riverotoledo_21 from the Portuguese Community*

• How to bring user’s variables/information that we want to use within the workflow that will be published in the Analytic App in the Gallery (For example, I believe that all “non-sensitive” information from MongoDB related to the Gallery actual session should become variables)

We are looking for the ability to use Alteryx as PaaS in the Azure cloud similar to how Databricks is working on Azure. So servers spin up when demand shows up and then they spin down.  Where we are not on the hook for server patching etc., but instead, we lease processing power/time from Alteryx in the cloud on an as needed basis. The licensing model will also need to be a scalable to support this type of usage.

It seems from my own experiences and other community posts (e.g. https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Discussions/Scheduled-worklfow-not-picking-up-the-qu...) that when scheduling a workflow in the gallery, the gallery will run whatever version was most recently uploaded, regardless of which one has been labeled as "Published". Since naturally the intent is for the Published workflow to be the only version running, it would be nice (adnd would me much more logical and intuitive) for the scheduler to run that version.

 Java Version upgrade requires LLS settings to be changed manually and LLS service to be restarted. 

Product should be capable of using the newly installed configuration and not require manual Config change and service restart. 

so every time there is a java version upgrade,  users have to be notified of the downtime  (even though they could move into 7 day grace period) and then the flexnetls.settings file should be updated with Java home path.  

@Kosi @SeanAdams 

Password entered during installation is changed to LLS default password after the following sequence of events.

LLS Service start -> Settings update -> Service restart (to let the settings change take effect). 

Avoiding this behavior will save server admin's time in changing password every time setting is changed. 

@Kosi @SeanAdams @ydmuley @RajK @LizaNemchynova @Arianna_Fuller @MPistone 

In Gallery 10, List Boxes (that are within a Radio Button) have their contents sorted horizontally.  Previously (Gallery 9.5) the contents of List Boxes was sorted vertically.  This new orientation makes it very difficult to find specific items within the list.  The problem is particularly severe for long lists, when it becomes common for the check box and associated text to become separated on two different lines.