Alteryx Server Ideas

Currently the server diagnostics (http://localhost/gallery/admin/#!diagnostics) covers a narrow time window (from what I can see - only the last few hours)

.... and if you attempt to zoom out or pan to see a broader time window - the graph gets smaller, but the data does not grow to fill the remaining space

Please could we request 2 changes:

a) add a time axis on the bottom of this chart so that the user can understand the time dimension 

b) Increase the time available for analytics to an arbitrarily broad set of data (which the admin can configure as a server setup parameter - retention period).   For us - we'd want to keep at least 3 months of data, and be able to view this analytically.

Thank you 

Sean

For scheduled jobs, there should be an option to include performance profiling in output logs globally.  Basically we are looking at how we can understand which custom macros are in use, and in which workflows, and one way to do this would be to get the output logs into another tool (i.e., splunk), and then set up some queries there.  It would work, but I would have to tell N developers to go set performance profiling on, re-upload their workflows, ect.  

But why not have a switch on server / gallery that just turns this feature on globally for every scheduled workflow?  

Thank you for attending my TED talk on why performance profiling should have an option to be set globally. 

As the Server Admin I'd like to have the ability to view ALL "Workflow Results" for all Subscriptions.This will give the highest level admin the ability to monitor all schedules (on the entire server instance) and monitor if they are unable to complete successfully (example- unable to allocate memory) and any other errors are occurring. 

Knowing this information will help the server administrator understand if there are issues with the server itself (e.g. if we need more workers or to simply adjust actual server system settings..etc..)

Given the need for administrators to be able to perform analysis and monitoring on server performance; user usage etc - it is necessary to provide full documentation for both the API and the database underlying the server so that admins can use this to good effect.

Ref: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Discussions/Server-API-Download-packages-for-surveil...

Although very limited documentation is available on the server API (https://gallery.alteryx.com/api-docs) what we're looking for is a much more fully formed and navigable experience like some of the examples below.

• https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/server/en-us/data_dictionary.html
• https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/api/rest_api/en-us/help.htm#REST/rest_api.htm%3FTocPath%3D___...
• https://community.lithium.com/t5/Developer-Documentation/bd-p/dev-doc-portal?section=commv2

This will make building helper processes substantially easier; as well as allow admins to fully manage their environment.

Many thanks

S

cc: @HeatherHarris @revathi @AshwiniChezhiyan @LizaNemchynova

I’ve had a query from a Team here at my organisation regarding OAuth2. They are trying to investigate whether a Robotic Process Automation Tool can be integrated with the Alteryx Gallery API.

It uses OAuth2 but my understanding is Alteryx Gallery uses OAuth1. 

Can Alteryx Gallery API be enhanced to use OAuth2? A plan to support OAuth2 authentication for a REST API in a future release?   

When an artisan moves positions (within or external) away from their current responsibilities, their collections and workflows should be able to be transferred via an administrator to another user.

Ability to change the default workflow settings when to also include [Others may view this workflow's history] in a similar way to the other attributes in workflow settings that are set by default.  This would prove beneficial for workflows which are shared across a large team and need to be run on a consistent frequency and are not run headless.  The inability to set this by default leaves a risk that the setting remains unchecked and more than one user triggers that workflow in a given month which could result in a material impact if the output of that workflow is posting to another system in the firm.

We have several clients that operate in a Multi-Forest environment due to mergers and acquisitions.  Currently with Alteryx Server the only option we can offer them is to use Built-In authentication.  A lot of corporate and particularly finance institutions prefer a single sign on approach and utilise Windows authentication to do this.

Would it be possible to add support for Multi-Forest organisations into Server to support organisations going through mergers and acquisitions?

This would really benefit us in selling Server in to organisations with complex structures and reduce friction in publishing or preparing workflows.

See following article for background reference: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Discussions/workflow-exceeded-maximum-runtime-of-30-...

I have a support case (#00278355) advising unsupported changes to the alteryx.config file, involving an undocumented setting for chainedTimeout, as in:

<engine enableAutoLicensing="true" useServiceLayerComposer="true" chainedTimeout="10800"

This setting should be documented, supported, and made user-configurable through the System Settings GUI. 

Our Organization uses a Password Manager to automate the update of service account credentials used in Windows Services. 

Would like to request the ability to leverage that functionality with the Run As user inside of Alteryx Server Settings used with Workflows. 

This would increase application security, while ensuring the process is automated, thereby limiting issues from human interaction.

Examples of these types of application are ERPM(Enterprise Random Password Manager), Thycotic Secret Server, and I am sure there are others. 

Hello Alteryx team, 

I would like to propose idea that was mentioned on the community but there is no solution either.

It was mentioned at https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Discussions/Data-Cleansing-tool-suddenly-stopped-w...

The issue is related to Qlik Analytics Samples and error that it is causing with wrong path error for default macros like eg.CountRecords.

We use the Server API to manage our server environment - and we recently noticed that the Workflows API (/admin/v1/workflows) ignores any canvasses after the 10 000'th submission.

For example:

• If we don't use any offsets or limits - then we get 10 000 applications
• If we use an offset of 5000 with a limit of 10000 - we get 5000 applications (i.e. anything after canvas 10 000 is being ignored)
• if we use an offset of 9990 with a limit of 100 - we get 10 rows returned (i.e. anything after canvas 10 000 being ignored)

By querying Mongo directly (appinfos collection) we know that we have 18 800 or so unique applications in our environment.

Please can you remove this cap from the API so that it can be used to query any number of canvasses on a larger environment?

cc: 

+  @Hemanth @marydest24 @Shreyasi @Sotoll @Kosi @revathi @Bethanyturner012  @TanyaS 

Using current version of the server - you can see that there is no OAuth managed or published API endpoint for canvas delete (screenshot 1).   However this API does CLEARLY exist as you can see if you inspect what happens when you hit the delete button (screenshot 2 clearly shows the API being called - but it requires user login security token)

Please can you enable this API for OAuth - the API already exists, it just needs to be exposed with the others.

CC: @BlytheE 

Could the community receive a comprehensive data dictionary of all the collections in Mongo with:

- Description of each collection

- Description of each attribute (or field) within each collection

- Documentation of joins between the collections

A great example can be seen in how Tableau documents their postgresSQL tables: https://help.tableau.com/current/server/en-us/data_dictionary.htm

This would be extremely helpful as we are determining which collections we need to store, how to construct queries and how to build analytics on our assets. 

Thank you!

Currently when scheduling workflows, there is an option to schedule based on the calendar day but not on business day. For example, if I want to run a workflow on Business Day 1 of every month, it is not necessarily the first day of every Month. For the month of June 2019, Business Day 1 is June 3rd, since the 1st and 2nd fall on the weekend. Many departments run their processes on Business Days rather than Calendar days. Also factoring Holidays into consideration would be a plus since January 1st for example is a Holiday, Business Day 1 would fall on the 2nd.

The Schedules tab of the Gallery currently lists all schedules, 20 to a page, with no option to filter.  I am currently managing 183 active schedules.  In order to find a single schedule, I have to sort by Workflow name, then page through 10 pages of schedules to find the schedule I'm looking for.

Please add an option to filter this list. 

Ideally, I would like to be able to filter on multiple fields at once (example:  Priority = High, Status = Active, Owner = Bob Smith, Times Run > 20).  Barring that, a simple search option on workflow name, similar to the search option on the Collections tab, would be enough.

For whatever reason a schedule is disabled, whether a Studio expires, or for any other legitimate reason, a notification email should be sent to the Admin and the one that created the schedule in advance of it being disabled. When a scheduled workflow is not executed, it leaves us scrambling for answers. A sudden disablement of the schedule is disappointing to discover after all other stones have been turned. Notify us in advance of a schedule being disabled. 

So - one of the biggest challenges that we have with the MongoDB used by Alteryx Server is that we continually have issues with locking (where our admins have to go in and undo locks)

Additionally - the current implementation of MongoDB connectivity does not support full Kerberos authentication which means that we're on a non-compliant install (which in a large enterprise is an uncomfortable place).

Given that a very large amount of what the server does is transactional - it would make sense to have an option to use a large-scale SQL server instead of using Mongo.   For large enterprise customers, there must be flexibility to allow the databases that they have large supported instances of (my strong preference would be MS SQL 2016).

MS SQL natively supports XML so all the canvasses can be stored in native format.   Additionally, MS SQL allows very fast query across XML, and given the clustering and reporting capabilities in MS SQL, this would dramatically increase our ability to self-manage our infra.

Given that Alteryx is looking more and more at large Enterprise customers - a move to a large-scale clustered SQL env as the back-end would be a very positive move.

NOTE: as we consider DB options for a SQL backend - please consider your large-scale enterprise customers.   For example - MS SQL or Oracle or DB2 are all much more prevalent in enterprises than databases like Postgres - so it's important to focus on the enterprise support for the DB that you choose.

+ @Deeksha @avinashbonu @revathi @BenBu

As Alteryx leans more into the Data Science space - it becomes more important to be able to keep rich documentation of the project along with the Alteryx Asset.    This does also require the concept of a "project" on the alteryx server, which would allow for meta-tags; and various different documents to be added with the project.

This would include things like Requirement documents; test evidence; test data sets etc.

This would extend Alteryx from a data prep engine to more of a data-science workbench as different user groups can participate in a specific project.