Alteryx Server Ideas

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.

Hey there,

Below you can see few of my suggestion to improve Alteryx Server. 

Idea for Alteryx Server monitoring:

• Increase data what could be seen on workflow results.
• Possibly create a report with filter option (to filter by user, gallery, workflow and etc.), which would at least contain data like:
  • Successfully ran workflows, count, percentage.
  • Failure rates, counts and etc.
  • Live data for monitoring purposes.
  • etc.
• Possibility to connect to workflow results data (live data) with other tools like Tableau or Power BI to create dashboards and etc. to monitor and act on the error as soon as possible.
• Give a chance for other users to check on the workflow statuses and etc same like workflow owner.

Give server more functionality with:

• Ability for server automatically retry workflow based on configurations: in example:
  • retry flow in specific time (for example in 30 minutes)
  • number of possible retries
  • based on specific workflow (other) results ability to trigger to run another workflow
  • (Maybe there is a better way) ability to run macros which would for example open MS Excel, and run macro inside it. I have some of the workflows where workflow opens excel, runs macro inside, that macro triggers special Add In which connects to Essbase, it pulls the data, saves excel file, and then alteryx continues working with the file. So if such or similar workflows could be run on Server that would be awesome.
  • This is extremely exiting one: possibility to create environment for self-service users, which it would not be something like gallery (because gallery is more suitable for Alteryx Designers/users).
    • in that one environment admin could grant access for user and tick what specific user could see and run.
    • so for admin it would be one environment, and user would see only what is needed for him/her.
    • in that environment user would also be able to schedule self-service workflows to be received in example by email, or BOX drive or any other way. Scheduled workflow would have to be approved by an admin before it would be actually scheduled. 
  • I have not tried this one myself, but that would also be great if all alteryx server environment could be accessed by mobile devices (of course, some features would be limited).

 Hopefully you will find these suggestions interesting and useful. 

Regards,

Aurimas

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.

Our corporation has multiple private studios set up (depending on various teams within our infrastructure); when we provide a user access to one private studio, they cannot be part of another private studio (to update/add/remove their workflows); they can view/see them within the collections, but cannot action them.

If possible within the Alteryx Server interface, could users be added to multiple/different private studios (and be authorized for all), and have a toggle that would allow them to switch back and forth? This would alleviate a lot of our issues we have with users reporting/being involved with multiple teams (who are requiring access to different private studios).

The gallery shouldn't allow to create data connections with already existing names.

For example, in designer it's difficult to choose which data connection we want to work with if they have the same name, please verify the images in attachment.

My company uses R Shiny and maybe in the future Python Dash to create multiple analytic apps, dashboards, etc for multiple people to run across our company. One thing that would be nice to to have these R Shiny workflows run off of the Alteryx Server as that would allow us to use Alteryx Server to keep permissions and ease of use.

I propose an update to the Alteryx Server that would allow for R Shiny apps to be run in the Alteryx Server with all functionality of custom R interactive plots, etc etc just like what you'd see in one hosted on a R Shiny Server.

The benefits of this would allow for my company to only have to manage one server instance (Alteryx) to run all of this. Since R/Python is allowed/used in Alteryx workflows already, can you add the ability to visualize R Shiny code/plots/interactions/etc within Alteryx Server itself?

At my organization, we have many workflows on our server that take data from one database and store it on another. We would love the ability for an alert system that warns us when a job fails so that we can solve it immediately and not risk the chance of not noticing until a few weeks or months later.

I am in the process of migrating apps from the old gallery to the new. I have screen captures of the results from the same app in both. In the older gallery version, if there is only a single file type available, it defaults to that file type and you click the icon for the type. In the new gallery version, you must select a file type before you can download the file, even if there is only a single type available. The dropdown makes sense for one that you have multiple types (like pcxml), but it makes no sense to require the user to go through an extra step to select a type before downloading when that's the only type they can download. Please see all the screen captures. The blue-ish background is from the new gallery.

While in a workspace or collection, it would be great to be able to select multiple workflows and perform a bulk action on them (e.g. delete). This would help cleaning up unused workflows quicker.

Thank you

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.

Please could all log file paths on Server have the option to change their location, including 

C:\ProgramData\Alteryx\ErrorLogs\AlteryxE2

To enable all log files to be written to an alternative drive than the installation.

The benefit it to prevent excessive space usage on the C: drive

Support have advised there is no way to alter the path or limit these log files by number or size.

Many thanks.

in version 2019.3, with artisan role, I able to add workflow to collection in the workflow page.

I not sure for later version, but in version 2021.4, only curator can do so. 

If I uploaded a workflow, designer already give me a link to the workflow, hence if I can add the workflow to the collection.

it goes through 2 pages within 2mins (max). it is very fast for me. 

but now, I have to go back to the homepage > collection > add workflow > wait eternal time for server to get the list of workflow > select it > click add.

it extra 5~ steps. with min 10mins extra time. and if the number of workflows larger and larger, 

it has chance that it fails to load the list and have to wait another 10mins, and another and another endless 10mins.

so 2mins > endless 10mins? please add back this feature.

When looking at a Workflow in the Gallery there is no way to tell if it currently resides in a collection. As a suggestion, a good place to have this information would be in the header block of a workflow where the version information and number of times a workflow was run is stored.

I would like to suggest the idea of being able to handle row-level security data sources in a more seamless way using Kerberos passthrough, where Alteryx Gallery will pass the information that User A is running the workflow to the underlying DB and will authenticate as User A. 

We have many workflows that are built to handle different queries of a database that are reliant on knowing who is running the workflow in Gallery. We also have many regional workers, and we want to keep the administration of these connections to the data as simple as possible. 

For more information, check out the Community thread on this subject.

As a Gallery Admin I would like to be able to add and remove a user from local groups on the User page.

I realise that this would only work for local groups and that AD groups would need to be excluded (and indicated as unavailable for editing)

On the Users page it is quick and easy to see what Role each user has - UNLESS they have been assigned the "Default" role in which case it will depend on Gallery Default Role and which Group(s) they are assigned to.

I propose an additional column be added to the page to show the Effective Role for each user. The purpose of this change is to allow an administrator to quickly and easily confirm the effective Role of any Gallery use by viewing the User page, without having to check the user's group membership and the Role assignment that those groups provide.

For those users with a assigned Role other than "Default" that value will obviously match the assigned Role.

For users assigned the "Default" Role the page should show the result that would be returned by the appropriate permission resolution code when determining their effective Role from the Group membership and the Gallery Default.

[Screen image is from 2020.4 - with my suggested positioning for Effective Role added]

As a further enhancement a set of checkboxes showing the value of the special permissions e.g. Create Collections, would be good but might require a more significant re-design of the page and would only be saving a single click. I suggest instead that it might be useful to have an enhanced filter view of users which allows an administrator to view e.g. all users who can Create Collections etc.

Hello everyone,

I created before a post about managing chained workflows using the API.
After reaching out the support, it turns out to be impossible, which is unfortunate.

So I post this idea here, in case anyone is needing it too.

Feels free to ask me details if needed.

Thanks.

The dcm admin apis look promising. I would love if they could add put endpoints for sharing/execution and sharing/collaboration for admins. There is already a delete command for those two endpoints

I remember when i started using Alteryx and the gallery i was able to display the results of a workflow run and then copy a value from the screen to complete checks on.

Now when i run a workflow and the .yxdb results and displayed ever if its one record i have to download a file and open it just to copy the value.

Can we not get the screen to allow highlight and control c of text as required?