Alteryx Server Ideas

Hello,


There are some tools that helps to monitor what happens on a website. Some are even open source (like matomo and open web analytics). Why not including one of those tools on Alteryx Server ?

There are of course a lot of feature but I like this one, an heatmap to show where a user click

Best regards,

Simon

As an admin - would like to have the following features on the Gallery

1. add summary cards to TOP of user page that show same summary as diagnostics page

2. "export to excel" icon 

3. ability to filter date

4. allow selection of ALL

5. allow me to default my settings choice so its always "all" - screen shot below

We spent almost a full day on Friday internally, and also about 3 or 4 hours of time for 3 Alteryx Server engineers (thank you all - MattH; ZachH; WayeW) and Ben Burkholder trying to get our gallery server to start.

Error message was "

Failed to construct Gallery daemon process, process exited code <9002>

This was all that was provided in the server log files; the gallery log files; and the Windows Event Viewer.

In the end, it turned out that the issue was very simple - the MongoDB had open locks in place that needed to be deleted; and then the service came up immediately.

Several man-days of our effort; as well as the precious time of the Alteryx Engineers who gave up their Friday afternoon to help could have all been avoided if the error-message on the server failure said "Login failure on server due to open locks - please clean out locks on db.locks collection" with a link to the solution or a lookup code that be researched on the Alteryx support site.     

Please could we go through the server service and eliminate all the exit codes and replace with human-friendly error messages - that way we could allow this kind of issue to be self-diagnosed, and allow the Alteryx Engineers to spend their time building the next generation of Alteryx Server rather than diagnosing a table lock.

cc: @avinashbonu @revathi @Deeksha @BenBu @WayneWooldridge @MattH @SteveA @ZachH 

Please support SAML 2.0 for gallery

Add Admin ability to place the Alteryx Service (Engine) into Maintenance mode allowing current workflows to complete, but all new workflow processing moved into Queue to allow for server configuration and/or maintenance.

Currently, if I want to make a small configuration change (like a memory setting in the Runtime settings) I have to hunt for a quiet window or the lowest level of activity to kill the service (and the running jobs).

It would be helpful to flip a 'switch' and have all new jobs go into 'Queue' allowing for the change and service stop/restart ... then pick right back up with the queue in configured order. (execution time, priority level, etc...)

Admin settings for the Alteryx server are currently split between the Admin GUI in the gallery (screenshot 1 below) and a tool called "Alteryx System Settings" (screenshot 2 below).

Please could you move all of the system settings into the Admin section of the GUI.   Not only will this allow an admin to administer the settings remotely (rather than having to be logged into the actual server with an interactive login which is needed now) - it will also consolidate them into one place which makes things easier for admins to ensure that all settings are set up correctly.

This could be done progressively - a little bit in every release - over the next couple of releases, it does not need to be done in a big reengineering or a massive big-bang release (in fact - progressive release is much more favourable since you learn along the way and big-bang releases are well known to be failure prone).

cc: @TanyaS 

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.

As users change roles; or possibly even leave the firm - we need to automatically manage the ownership of their and their permission.

- We need to be able to export all permissions and ownership of assets by user using an API

- We then need to be able to revoke permissions using an API (we have a central entitlement management process that this can be tied into)

- we also need to trigger a revoke on all licenses via API.

If done within Alteryx server:

- When a dept code on a user changes; or user leaves - trigger an invalidate on all assets.

- Workflow to both the primary and secondary owner to ask for a new owner

- Also automatically trigger a revoke on all licenses

Alteryx Server does a pretty good job of tracking all the information you need in order to find out who ran a workflow at a given time, even if that workflow has been deleted from the Gallery.

However, if I need to identify what that workflow actually did on a specific date, and that version is no longer available on the Gallery, it gets really hard to track down.

There are some posts throughout the community on leveraging the MongoDB to try and reconstruct this, but in some cases the workflow is "Chunked" and becomes impossible for an end user to reconstruct.

I spoke to support about this recently and they suggested that by using the Scheduler, I could schedule the historical instance of the workflow and then "Really quickly" grab it when it was reconstructed from the temporary staging folder used by our Alteryx Server.  This has a few concerns, among them, finding a way to run this workflow so that the files can be created but it has no impact on tables, for instance if the given workflow drops a table as part of its execution.  Additionally, the only way to schedule with a different set of permissions in a 1-Worker environment is to change the default "Run Workflows As" to a different user, who also needs permission to access all files on the Alteryx Server.  This can also impact any other Scheduled or Gallery job that is executed while this recovery is underway, effectively causing downtime to do file recovery.

These restrictions are specific enough as to be impractical for most organizations using Alteryx Gallery/Server.

I think this could be solved by adding to the Scheduler an option along the lines of "Download a copy of the workflow", available to administrators. Ideally this copy could include some important metadata, like when that version of the workflow was uploaded, who uploaded it, and its ID/Version Number from the Gallery.

This would go a long way towards making it easier to Audit and respond to requests for historical information about Alteryx Workflows on the Server, and since the Alteryx Engine can already recreate these workflows, I think that a basic version of this feature could simply save out that temporary file, rather than executing it.

I would suggest a service split to simplify maintenance actions in the Alteryx Server.

Split Alteryx Service into 5 services:

 Alteryx controller

• Dependencies: Alteryx Database
• Purpose: Controls job submissions
• Meaning: The Alteryx controller Service stopped means neither the users or the scheduler can submit new jobs

Alteryx Database

• Dependencies: N/A
• Purpose: Database
• Meaning: The Alteryx Database Service stopped means all the platform is down

Alteryx Gallery

• Dependencies: Alteryx Database
• Purpose: Controls the Web UI
• Meaning: Alteryx Gallery Service stopped means the gallery web page is down

Alteryx Scheduler

• Dependencies: Alteryx controller, Alteryx Database
• Purpose: Controls the scheduled jobs
• Meaning: The Alteryx Scheduler Service stopped means the users can still submit jobs manually but scheduled jobs wont be submited

Alteryx Worker

• Dependencies: Alteryx controller, Alteryx Database (only applicable if the server where the Alteryx Worker Service is running the Alteryx controller)
• Purpose: Executes the jobs
• Meaning: The Alteryx Worker Service stopped means no job will be executed on the node

This service split will help perform some maintenance tasks and enables the Platform Administrators to shutdown the platform correctly shutting down the services in the correct order.

Usage Example 1 (Cold Backup):

• Stop the controller so no more jobs can be submitted
• Stop all the workers
• After all the workers have stopped the Alteryx Database Service and the rest of the remaining services can be shutdown
• Preform the Cold Backup
• Start the services

Usage Example 2 (Changes in the worker configuration - By doing this the users will still have access to the gallery and their jobs):

• Make changes in the worker configuration
• Restart only the worker service

Usage Example 3 (Changes in the Gallery Page or Configurations):

• Stop the Gallery Service
• Make the changes
• Start the Gallery Service

We are hoping to move to Mongo Enterprise as the backend for our Alteryx server, however we may not be able to given that Alteryx does not currently support Kerberos & Keytab authentication.    

Please could you add this to the server so that larger clients with Enterprise Mongo can scale upwards?

cc: @avinashbonu @DamianA @BenBu @Deeksha

Isn't it great that we can toggle between outputs from an app in the Gallery, being able to view and download each one? Yes! However, what if an app produces a lot of outputs...such as 1 per state...or 1 per product type...or 1 per month...etc. What is get is something like this:

Now imagine how long it would take to download all of these...ouch. I recommend Alteryx add a "Download All" button to the page that appears after an app finishes running.

Related Community Post here.

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?   

Hello Community:

I was looking in the notifications part of the Gallery Admin and saw a glaring ommission: The validation email was something about a code, but nothing about a workflow. "What?!" I interrogo-banged.Where is "Email when workflow is complete?"

I would like to move that Gallery include an option (at the workflow level and globally within a studio (perhaps beyond, I'm a newb to Gallery)) that a user can subscribe to an email notification if the workflow completes (or errors out). 

Where I'm currently working, we have some workflows that take, literally, in the twenty-plus hour range. Instead of having to check when it is complete, it would be really nice to get an email from Gallery saying: "Hi guys! [Workflow X] is done! YAY!"

I realise there's an email tool in the rendering, but that is... shall we say, complicated. In this case, we're using an R-tool, so all the downstream tools are blind to the metadata. Filtering records down to one so that only one email is sent at the end of the chain is... challenging (remember that 20-hour thing? Try developing on a 20+ hour cycle. It's like 1970 up in here!). And totally counterintuitive. I also feel new users will have issues configuring an email tool; it took me 3 months to get ours to work and it only works from our server. Plus, it's a kludgy workaround. 

I feel that this would probably be easy to implement and fits the sensibilities of Gallery. 

Vote this up, folks!

Cheers,

Cedric

Our company has workflows where we use the Gallery API to kick off executions on server.  The user kicking off the workflow has setup API access using his account, but when he kicks off his jobs, it does not show up under his Gallery so he is unable to view the results.  In the admin panel, it shows the owner as (None) so it does not appear that workflows kicked off via the API get assigned to the user tied to the API key.

Conversations with Alteryx support revealed that these results are available via an API call, but not within the Gallery web UI.  It would be great if the user tied to the API key were added to the workflow execution so they could see results within the Gallery rather than going back through the API.  

Please Enable OAuth 2.0/OpenID Support for Alteryx Server  & Connect. Currently, it supports only AD , SAML . 

Current SAML has limitations, Unable to import Security groups from LDAP/AD if SAML is enabled.  

From a security standpoint, it is important that all users are authenticated when accesing the Gallery on Alteryx Server and using local accounts.  There shgould be an option available to force user to the login page rather than the public Gallery.  Users going to the Alteryx server URL should be presented with the login page by default before being taken to the Gallery, rather than seeing the public Gallery and needing to click Sign-in in the upper right corner.

On the workflow results window, I'd like to see a column for "Start Time". If I have a workflow that is running, I'd like to know what time it started running so I have an idea on when it might finish.

Although the connectivity to the eMail infrastructure is set up on the controller and worker nodes - there is no ability to set up automated alerting for errors on workflows from the server.

We would like to be able to set up the gallery as follows:

- Every job is owned by a user or a distribution list

- If that workflow throws an error or warning (this should be configurable on the server, whether warnings are included), then the author should be e-mailed with a link to the specific workflow and the error log.

This can be done in a round-about way, by running an error-reporting alteryx job after the fact - but this kind of alert needs to go out almost immediately given our dependance on Alteryx for specific SLAs.

cc: @avinashbonu ; @Deeksha ; @revathi