Alteryx Server Ideas

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.

On Server Version 2019.4 I was able to use a SQL query as an external data source for my analytic app options for a drop down menu, tree, list, etc. When we upgraded to 2022.4, this capability was lost and according to the article below a chain analytic app is the best, but unnecessarily complex work around.

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Hello Alteryx Devs - 

So, I'm poking around the Atlerxy Gallery API stuff with an eye toward building a set of classes that can interact with workflows without exposing Gallery proper to the community at large.  That being said, I was a little dismayed to find that all interactions require inclusion of *user specific* API Keys and Secrets.  It can be dealt with, but ultimately it means that configuring a middleware tier between the real world and Alteryx server requires an additional hierarchical level; i.e., understanding which of the developers came up with workflow X and having *their* API Key / Secret attached at configuration time.  

Anyways, it might be easier to just have a global trusted key / (super) secret.  If you get that, you can execute a workflow.  

Maybe we have a special studio that people could clone to, and in this way, you'd only have to track a single key/secret outside.  

I mean, the existing system works OK for one offs, but if you wanted to have a (semi) modular system in place, dependence on understanding publishing entity specifics seems to muck things up for no discernible benefit.  Of course, maybe in some places there is benefit to this scheme (?), but it is causing me to craft some weird work arounds early in development, which gives me a sinking feeling.

Or am I doing it wrong? 

Thanks for listening. 

brian

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.