Alteryx Server Ideas

The idea is to have tabs on separate pages in the Gallery (or the option to allow that type of behavior).  Right now, if you created an analytic app that has questions on different tabs they will be on separate pages in Designer, but when you push the workflow to the Gallery all the questions will be on the same page. The tabs act as a navigation bar instead of taking you to separate pages. 

Here's two different discussions that ask about this in case there is any confusion:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Discussions/Interface-Designer-with-TABS-in-the-serv...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Discussions/Analytic-App-Tabs-in-Gallery/m-p/846477/...

We have the Local License Server installed.  Right now, if a Designer user changes roles, or leaves the company, they have to release their license from their client-side machine.  If they don't release it properly, and IT can't get us into their machines, then we have to wait 7 days for that license to roll off the server.  There should be a way for a system admin to forcefully revoke someone's license.

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 

Currently, the API V3 endpoints does not have anything for Data Connection Manager (DCM). Create an endpoint to allow users to add/delete/update and list data sources, credentials, and users of DCM data sources. Also include an "admin" endpoint that can list all of the above for the entire server.

The admin screen of Alteryx gallery does not have an admin function for DCM sources, its users, and credentials. This can cause visibility issues during audits of the gallery. An API endpoint can alleviate this issue until it is added to the UI.

It would be nice if the Gallery Admin could download the workflow from the workflow page within the UI, without having to run API calls or having to add himself temporarily to someone else's studio. 

Hello

Imagine the dream : Alteryx Designer Cloud with in database tools.

Well, that would be so great I won't write more....

Best regards,

Simon

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

At some point we would like Alteryx Gallery to support SSO via SAML and Authorization via AD groups. The way I want is to have Authentication via SAML and Authorization via AD groups. For instance one of our apps Tableau: It does authentication via SAML (SSO) and for authorization, we import AD groups into Tableau thrice a day(stores the groups in a .xml file), once the groups are in the Tableau, we secure the objects within Tableau using that LDAP groups (which kind of become local groups after import). Basically the userid after the successful authentication step is used by the app for authorization.

I just stated Tableau as one of the ways to implement Authentication and Authorization for an enterprise app. If Alteryx Gallery needs to be an enterprise app, you will need to look into this idea. 

Thanks
Raj

When a workflow is run manually in the gallery the user is able to enter input parameters. However when using the schedule functionality this option is not available and a separate workflow needs to be developed to dynamically derive input parameters. Effectively two separate versions of the workflow need to be created and maintained.

If this functionality could be built into a future version of Alteryx this would be of significant benefit.

We really like the idea of the Server Usage Report.  But the PDF is somewhat limited and we use Power BI instead of Tableau.  It would be great if the Workflow had an option for outputting to Power BI.

For a given DB connection - there's a need to be able to specify the owner for this specific connection.

Reason for this is that the credentials for a given DB are not all managed by the central admin team - so we'd want to say that a given DB connection is owned by a particular person so that this can be updated frequently as passwords change.

For resilience - our particular policy would be to have 2 owners so that if one person resigns or changes roles, it invalidates the primary and reverts to the secondary - and then asks the new Primary to create a backup owner.

Current State:

Currently, all workflows and applications are in list-form within "My Workspace" (formerly Private Studio) and Collections.  In My Workspace, I might have workflows and applications that support a broad range of domain spaces and audiences.  As the developer (or Artisan), they're all in My Workspace, but shown as an exhaustive list with no categorization unless I name them to represent not only the function of the workflow/application but also the domain. 

Once those same workflows/applications are moved to collections, there can exist confusion over whether the workflow/application is intended for a schedule, manual run, or application.  Separating by naming convention gets messy and degrades clarity for non-developer roles.

Proposed Solution:

I would like to see folders, only one or two levels deep, be added to My Workspace and to Collections.  This proposed solution would not alter permissions, as those would be common for the parent collection and any assigned roles would function the same for that entire collection.  The solution is simply adding organization to enhance the user experience.

For example:  I might have a Collection that is intended for my Finance team....

Finance_Collection / Scheduled_ETL_Workflows / Workflows

Finance_Collection / Scheduled_Analytic_Workflows / Workflows
Finance_Collection / Applications_for_AccountingDepartment_ReceivablesTeam / Workflows
Finance_Collection / Applications_for_AccountingDepartment_PayablesTeam / Workflows
Finance_Collection / Manual_ETL_Workflows / Workflows

Finance_Collection / Manual_Analytic_Workflows / Workflows

Finance_Collection / etc...

All persons who have been assigned the role connected to the "Finance Collection" will still see everything in all of the folders but would have a better sense of what "workflows/applications" are intended for their use according to the folders the workflows/applications are organized into.

Value Added (Why This Matters):

• Enhanced user experience (easier to find the correct workflows
• The volume of roles and collections can be reduced, thus reducing Admin strain
• The solution does not impact roles and permissions
• Overall management of workflows and applications is enhanced for the Artisans

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I welcome input and feedback from the community and would appreciate your support if you find this suggestion useful for your Alteryx experience!

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 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. 

Greetings Server friends!

I was talking with @KevinP in the Solutions Center at Inspire and we talked a lot about how Server has been evolving over the last several versions. I'd like to request that end users be able to select workflows or applications shared with them as "Favorites." It would be great for ServerUI to offer a separate section for these selected "favorites" so that the end users can have a single go-to place to access their most frequently used apps.

 @JohnPelletier 

Can we add an ability to manually adjust the order of workflows in a collection? I don't think we should have to go and click the column to sort each time if we want them in alphabetical order. It looks better for the end user to have everything nice an arranged when you have multiple processes in each collection.

Can we make API function available to assign specific worker node while submitting job request using api.

Today in managing Alteryx server, we manually configure new connections using the front end.  However, this has some potential drawbacks as it makes it hard to easily track change history, or make bulk updates to multiple strings, and it also leaves room for user error on configuration.

In this case I'm pretty specifically looking to modify aliases on the server itself.  I'm not particularly concerned with distribution to a wider audience, and the usernames/passwords associated in this case should not be available for use locally by users.  As a part of this, I am trying to identify a method to reduce or eliminate the need for anyone (including the data connection manager) to need to know the password for the specified accounts.  As some of these accounts may be used by multiple systems, it would be significantly simpler to integrate this maintenance into existing automated processes, rather than have a manual step to update the Alteryx connection values on the Gallery.

This is specifically a challenge today with regards to specific usernames or passwords which need to be stored.  Alteryx saves these values using machine-level encryption, but that is difficult to generate automatically.  Having a supported method that would easily allow creation of this file with password-level information would greatly improve maintenance of the Alteryx Server, particularly from an IT automation perspective.

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.