Alteryx Server Ideas

It would be beneficial to be able to add a description to collections to explain the purpose of the collection, i.e. the types of content contained within or even a waiver stating "use of the contents in this collection is at your own risk, please ensure you validate the results are accurate" sort of thing.

We leverage Active Directory groups to manage user permissions to most of our company's resources like databases, file shares, applications, etc.  This idea is for the ability to manage a Gallery Data Connection via an Active Directory group.  In many cases, our AD group membership actually dictates what permissions a gallery connection should have, but we must manually add/remove users to the Alteryx connection to keep it synched with AD.

I think there are several ways Alteryx could be enhanced to support this; i.e. the AD group could be specified on the connection itself or it could be inherited from a Studio where the subscription is enhanced to support assigning AD groups to it (which could benefit other areas of Alteryx).

I'm told by Alteryx support that this functionality is unsupported but to post the idea here.  If anyone knows of workarounds to this limitation I'd certainly be interested!

This idea has been touted in different flavours over the years (but not implemented), but I'd like to push it a little further:

1. Create the ability to collaboratively edit an Alteryx workflow - e.g. like you can edit Microsoft documents collaboratively. If the front-end is primarily an XML interface, this should in theory be possible?

2. Version control (not version tracking) - i.e. automatically state the differences in scripts between versions and allow for checking in and checking out of code

3. Power BI & Tableau Prep have the ability to see exactly what changes were made and to reverse steps to get back to a specific stage of development: it would be great to have a panel that tracks all the edits you've made since you started editing the workflow

In simple terms, a modern, interactive way for multiple developers to work together, but also to encourage the use of Server to "check in" your application and to avoid developers saving the same file over & over again locally.

after run workflow in server, it has to download output files one by one. it very annoying when the number is huge.

please change like other platform like SharePoint etc. enable select all options and/or download all options.

Given some jobs are scheduled / can take a while to run it would be useful if Server provided the option to notify the submitting user when it has been completed, which a link to the results.

If you look at post: Re: How do I extract Server Job Run ID at runtime - Alteryx Community amongs others you can see there have been various attempts to create workarounds for this using a combination of API's & Mongo DB calls to build up the information to provide a URL in an email at the end of the flow. However, it feels like this should be an out of the box notification that can be enabled/disabled at the flow level with Alteryx Server.

It would be very useful to have a standardized method to set up notifications to the server admins and to the job owner themselves if an alteryx canvas fails (error).

My understanding is that currently the only way to do notifications on failure for every canvas is for every canvas to individually set up events.   On a large implementation, this becomes very difficult to manage.

User who share Apps/Workflows with other users in a collection are not able to see the results of the other users executions directly in the gallery.

Could you please add the possibility to share workflow results in the Alteryx Gallery?

Improve Gallery scheduling to allow the end user to specify company denoted Holidays when scheduling a workflow. If the workflow is scheduled on a Holiday the schedule would not run. This should be configurable per workflow schedule. Example: A daily report Monday through Friday would be able to skip Holidays based off a Holiday exclusion list. 

There is no good way to get server user credentials into a workflow without asking them for it in an App interface.  It would be great if we could have a built in Constant that could be used to silently pass user credentials into a workflow for things like API's or logging user information.

Today, when you trigger a job using the Server API, it is considered as a manual run type. In fact there are only 2 type of jobs : "Scheduled" and "Alteryx_Run"

I think "Alteryx_Run" should be segregated into "API_Run" and "Manual_Run". This way in future version we could treat those type of job differently. 

We could also have more stats around the type of jobs.

Hello all,

According to https://openlineage.io/ 

An open framework for data lineage collection and analysis

Data lineage is the foundation for a new generation of powerful, context-aware data tools and best practices. OpenLineage enables consistent collection of lineage metadata, creating a deeper understanding of how data is produced and used.

 
This is typically the open standards needed for lineage analysis and I think it will become more and more a differenciator with your competitors. As of today, DBT or Apache Airflow already supports it (as producer), Egeria or Marquez already support it (as consumer) and guys from Datahub are working on it  (as consumers)https://feature-requests.datahubproject.io/p/openlineage
So I think Alteryx should implement this standard API as a producer, it's the next big thing in Data Governance and you don't want to stay behind !

Best regards,

Simon

Maintaining multiple workers (five currently, soon, six) with identical setups is challenging when dealing with In-Database (InDb) connections. I must log in to each worker, start Alteryx Designer, go to In-Db settings, and create the connection. This also becomes tedious when trying to update passwords, which occurs every 90 days in my company.

The suggestion is to set up an In-Db connection on one worker and have it propagate to the other workers. 

Propagates to other workers →

This would save time maintaining workers in the gallery and help prevent errors during setup on each worker (e.g., typing in the wrong password).

As an "extra credit" mission, expose In-Db connections through an API that can list, create, update, or delete an In-Db connection.

One of our Server customers has a need to disable all schedules temporarily across all worker nodes.  I do not see an easy way to do this unless we go into each worker's settings and disable from there, but this is not ideal.

The reason is for scheduled maintenance windows during a large upgrade or migration.  Currently stopping the Alteryx Service on each worker is time consuming.

Thank you! 

My team has started using an Alteryx Gallery 2022.1 instance and we have workflows that take a few minutes to run. Whenever we run a workflow, we are presented with a blank screen instead of the progress bar that we are used to in previous versions of the Gallery. I was wondering if there is a way of enabling the progress bar or at least setting up a load screen to notify the user that the workflow is in progress to avoid them wanting to re-run the application because “nothing is happening”.

This is what we are seeing:

This is what we are used to and would want to see when running our applications:

I have three team members all in the same private studio. We can see each others' workflows. However, when looking at a workflow that another team member has published to the gallery, it looks like:

1. The workflow has never been run
2. The workflow is not scheduled to run

This is a massive impediment to collaboration because my team handles ETL for most of the company. If a user complains that their data isn't up to date, whoever receives that support ticket needs to be able to see if the workflow is actually running and whether it was successful or had an error during the last run.

Preventing a team from seeing this for each others' workflow schedules and results means that the only person who can deal with an issue is the person who originally made the workflow. Which makes the idea of a shared private studio wholly pointless as we may as well be operating in different universes.

Please create a studio-level setting where all members of a studio can see all schedules and results of all workflows in that studio.

When adding jobs to the queue via API call, you currently cannot specify the name of the job.

Running the job directly from gallery allows this as in the picture below, but there is no setting to do so in the API.

When a workflow is used in many different situations, being able to specify a name for the individual run will make tracking and troubleshooting easier.

Wanted to grab some attention here regarding the Alteryx gallery search engine (which also bleeds over into searching for schedules and jobs when troubleshooting). 

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I'm pasting two pictures (one attachment) of searching our gallery for the word "Contour" and the word "Signal". Both of these words are in the title of a single workflow - when I search for the word "Contour", the workflow pops up. When I use the first word in the workflow, which is "Signal", it doesn't pop up. 

I appreciate all that Alteryx does, but I wouldn't think this should be a difficult issue to fix, and I would imagine there are other frustrations with the functionality here. 

I might be missing something here but as far as I know there is no feature (user or admin) providing a list of data connections being used by a specific workflow. And conversely, which workflows use a given data connection. This should work for both 'Standard' Data Connections as well as the DCM. 

I would like to propose a number of small enhancements to the Gallery:

1. Time format. The 12-hour time format (

    

   ) is confusing to everybody except Americans. Please add support for a 24-hour format. This could be done either by extending the Locale settings or by a separate check box. Please make sure that this time format is used everywhere in the Gallery (last update, last run, schedule, etc.).
2. Date format. Even though using English as GUI language, I prefer the time format according to ISO 8601-1, namely "YYYY-MM-DD". Please add support for this format, independent of selected language.
3. Number of Rows per Page in My Workspace: Each time I open My Workspace, the number of listed workflows per page is set back to 10. Please add support to set the default number of workflows in the user settings or at least preserve the chosen number within the same session.
4. Fully utilize the screen in My Workspace: Even after switching to more than 10 rows per page, nearly half of my screen stays empty. Please add function to utilize the screen completely.