Alteryx Server Ideas

In the Alteryx Gallery UI, it's possible to set up workflow credentials so that a workflow published to the gallery runs as a specific user.  

Unfortunately when that workflow is run from the Alteryx Gallery API, it appears to only ever run as the Alteryx Server Run-As account. 

Our developers in working with this figured out that if they called the (undocumented) API that runs the actual Alteryx Gallery directly, they can achieve what they want, but it seems a risky strategy.

The idea would be:

-Either unify the APIs so that the Gallery itself uses the same API to run workflows as what you present as the "Gallery API" (the eat your own dogfood way)

-Alter the Gallery API to enable us to run as a different workflow credential

Without this, we're forced to permission the run-as account to access anything that uses this method, which in turn then becomes a bit of a security hole (any workflow run will have access to everything that the run-as account uses) 

Hi,

@patrick_digan pointed out to me today that in my ignorance I thought that the "On Success - Show Results to User" option in Interface Designer did something on Alteryx Gallery, like it does when run locally.  I tried to prove him wrong (I've been manually checking off what outputs I want since day 1! How could it not have been doing anything?!) and failed miserably.  As far as we can tell, this functionality is simply non-existent within Gallery.

Please add this functionality so that we can suppress files (without reverting to hacky tricks like changing the output location so the Gallery can't see the output) with a simple check box.

Link to my shame, where I very openly explained exactly how I thought I had been solving this problem the whole time, and how after testing and review, it looks like I hadn't done anything with this configuration.

All these check boxes... and they don't change anything!

In larger organizations or organizations with global coverage, it is possible for users to be in different time zones from each other and the Alteryx server. 

WIth our implementation of Alteryx server, we have the server time zone set to that of our data warehouse, but this time zone is different than my own by -2 hours. In the case of scheduling a workflow in the future, I normally correct for this by setting the scheule in the time zone of the server and things work alright. 

Problem 1:

It falls apart is when I want to schedule something in the future, but it is within the timespan between my time zone and the server time zone. For example: It is 6PM my time, and 4PM server time. I want to schedule a workflow to run at 5PM server time (7PM my time). When I try to set this up with the Version 10 scheduler built into Alteryx desktop, it overides the date field upon saving to run the following day instead of today as it thinks im trying to schedule the run at a time that has already passed (which it has in my timezone, but not in the server time zone). Upon trying to edit this schedule to reset the date to today, it again reverts upon saving.  

The only way I have found to get around this is to reset the time zone of my computer to match the server time zone, then set the schedule, then reset the time zone of my machine back to local time again. This is not the best experience, and will likely be required more frequently for users as their time zone difference increases. 

Problem 2:

When wanting to run something server side immediately (I do this in cases where the runtime will be long, or im mobile and on a machine with a lower amount of processing resources) the "Once" option can be used in scheduler to push something to server and run it. In my case, due to the timezone difference, the default time set when trying to do this is the current time in my time zone, but 2 hours ahead of the current server time.

I have two proposed resolutions:

1) Transmit Server time zone information to the local scheduler to have everything involving scheduling in Server time. Also for any timestamp fields, include the time zone designation so its clear to the user.

2) Use information from the user's machine and information from the server to do timezone conversions behind the scenes so whenever scheduling or viewing schedules, all timestamps are in local time to the user. I feel this is the prefered solution for the best user experience, but would also be the more complex to implement. 

Thanks,

Ryan

Hi,

We have more than 100 workflows scheduled in different intervals for a day. Inorder to monitor this we have to manually check in the workflow results if the workflow ran successfully or not. 

Say a workflow is scheduled every 30mins then we have to check this 48times in a day manually in the Gallery results if it ran successfully or not.

Similarly we will have N number of workflows scheduled with different intervals.

We feel its too time consuming to manually verify this.

It will be good if there is a notification when there is a failure in the run, so we can check it only then rather than checking it every 30mins.

It is currently (Alteryx Server 2018) not possible to delete Districts one created - we can only disable them. See also: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Connect-Gallery/Deleting-Gallery-Districts/m-p/32684

Frankly, this is rather inconvenient if one wants to restructure a Gallery. Renaming them is an option, but there might still be a number of districts we want to delete. Would appreciate if this could be considered for a future update.

Please support GZIP files in input tool in Server. This is related to https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Support-for-GZIP-gz-compressed-files-in-input..., but logged in a separate Idea because the staff indicated in the thread that they are planning support for GZIP in Designer only in 2018.2. We need it in Server as well.

Hi Alteryx experts!

There were some ideas similar to this one but none like it and really really old ones, so I`m revamping the idea due to recent struggles and the many questions we got on the server discussion board!

Workflow events are nice and helpful but they require the user to add it to every single workflow.

The Gallery admin also struggles to know when a schedule fails. 

There was the Server Usage Report before, but now most server admins have no idea when a schedule fails.

There are many ways of managing schedules and failed jobs (MongoDB, logs, events), but it would be nice to add a simple option to notify a user on each schedule. It would be even better if we added another option to enable this option in all schedules globally!

This idea could be combined with this one from @fjablo 

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Ideas/Notification-from-the-Alteryx-Server-when-a-sc...

Let me know what you all think!

Best,

Fernando Vizcaino

When saving a workflow to the Gallery, I would like an option on the Save window to save directly to a collection. This can be an existing collection, or would have the ability to create a new collection. The current process requires you to log into the Gallery after saving the workflow and move it to the appropriate collection.

Hi there,

On the server product you have the ability to set up timeouts to avoid server resources being hogged by any one canvas.

Currently this setting only applies to scheduled canvasses - however this leaves a gap where users can just run this manually.

Please can you extend this setting to also cover manually initiated jobs too?

Currently when running an Alteryx Workflow from the gallery via the API, it doesn't get logged in the user interface in the same way that running it interactively in the gallery GUI does - a shame as it then becomes harder to know the traffic and performance of a workflow run in this way.  

Hello, I would like improved user management features and/or training

• Display 100 does not seem to work consistently
• Click /navigate from user to user – once I select a user would like to go to next user
• Changes I make with filters refresh every time I go back – which means I have to constantly reset my view in between each user
• Modify user settings in collections – would like to modify user settings instead of delete and re add user

Starting with Windows Sever 2016 edition one could use Docker containers technology on windows environments. My idea is to dynamically convert Designer jobs/workflows  to Docker containers at runtime.

Currently the only filtering available in the Results tab in View Schedules is by Workflow Name. It would be nice to be able to filter by Status, so we can just look for potential problems, like warnings or errors. Currently, I have a job that runs every 5 minutes. That means I have to scroll through hundreds of rows, or about 12 pages using the default 25 rows per page, just to scan for potential problems in the last 24 hours.

I would like to see the ability to post comments under workflow information to help with development and elicit feedback. Currently if there is a problem with the macro/workflow you must contact the owner of the workflow directly. It would be nice to leave the creator of the workflow a constructive comment, operating question or a thank you comment. Especially in the Public Gallery where the development time of new version could be reduced for both private individuals looking to share and macros developed by Alteryx that eventually turn into standard tools.

I just underwent an exercise of recovering my controller in the event of a catastrophic failure. One of the steps is to recover the DCME keys (DCM Encryption keys) - which is documented here: https://help.alteryx.com/20221/en/server/install/server-host-recovery-guide/dcme-keys-to-backup.html...

This DCME recovery needs to be revisited. This document assumes that the previous controller is running. In a disaster recovery situation, this is not possible. What, if any, can be done to recover the DCME keys if the host has is completely irrecoverable?

For context, having an irrecoverable host has happened. Complete hard drive failure (showing my age), nuked virtual machine and its backups (no one paid attention to the notices that the data center was shutting down), and fire.

Currently, we see the Districts and Collections now compressed into a list view. 

Previously, the Server had the widgets feature which really showcased the self-service nature of the Sever. Losing that just made decreased the emphasis on user experience. 

It would be great to allow Server Admins to decide whether they want lists or widgets to be available toggles as a design feature for both districts and collections will be of great help.

In addition, regardless of the option, the image size and wording size should be much larger - easier for people to see. Right now, we have to zoom to 150% to make it easier for ourselves to see. Having the ability to control font size, font control with bolds, italtics, etc. will be very helpful as well.

Hi all,

In an enterprise environment - DB connections need to be set up from the server and pushed down to your users; and they need to be managed across the various servers in your software lifecycle.

In other words - you may have a sandpit / dev server env; a UAT env; a pre-prod; and a prod env - and each of these need to have the same DCM credential IDs so that users can access these.     

(before you say "you can do this from the desktop) - that is true, however that's not a workable solution in an enterprise env because that means that users can change the password from their desktop into a prod env which is a breach of IT General Controls)

The solution here is to break DCM out in to a separate service - where

- all your servers (dev; UAT; Pre-Prod; Prod) can all point to one instance of DCM

- users can maintain their own connections and credentials

        - Each needs to have up to 2 owners so that you can deal with people moving jobs / leaving the firm

- users can also entitle these connections and credentials to their team members so that when the team member logs in, it shows a popup saying "you've just been given access to new credentials / connections"

- A particular connection may have multiple different variants - depending on the environment.

        - HR Data may point to a UAT version of HR data if you're on the UAT server; and to Prod if you're on the Prod server

        - if a connection is environment specific - then it also needs to have segregated credentials (since the login to your UAT HR Data may not be the same as prod).

Thank you all

sean

cc: @wesley-siu @_PavelP 

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.