Alteryx Server Ideas

As we have more and more users onboarded to the Server, and many users share similar names, it is getting more and more complicated to manage. 

It will be great if we have a management console that allows us to create User Groups, Tags, set User Departments, and more controls alongside their curator, designer, etc status on Server.

Groups like User Groups gives a group of people access into certain workflows, districts, collections, etc. It will also be helpful as it can also be an audit trail of who ran what - with a feature that allows users or groups of users to run certain tasks or schedules. 

Apparently I click too fast sometimes when saving a project, but there are a number of times where the workflow name hasn't populated when saving to the gallery and it ends up saving a blank file name. This is a pain because I can't do anything with the one in the gallery because there is nowhere to click on it, so I can't use the replace function and have to re-save it and re-add it back into any collections that it was in.

I realize that I just need to slow down, but I do this frequently enough where it absolutely drives me crazy. Being able to change file names in the gallery would be a big plus instead of just using the replace option.

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?

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

At the moment when you give the "assign job" permission the user can choose any worker, it would be great if there was a way to assign workers to users or groups.

Example 1 (worker 3 is assigned to one group):

Worker1 - Assigned to ALL

Worker2 - Assigned to ALL

Worker3 - Assigned to ArtisansGroup1

In this scenario, all Gallery users have access to Worker 1 and Worker 2 and the ArtisansGroup1 has access to Worker1, Worker2 and Worker3.

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

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.

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.

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.

It's been mentioned previously but I haven't seen an official idea posted. The width of the "Name" column on the Collections page needs to be adjustable to allow users to see the full name. Since we have many distinct areas, we use naming conventions to help organize different groups' Collections. But, even as short as we try to keep it the full names don't appear most of the time. At the very least, increase the default width because cutting the names off after 24 characters is simply too short.

It would be helpful if there was a way to setup notifications so that it would email Admin whenever a workflow runs longer than a preset amount of time.

Admin would set time threshold for triggering notification i.e. > 15min and Alteryx Server would email Admin whenever a workflow runs longer than that so that they could monitor this specific workflow and take corrective action,

Can we have search option enabled in Gallery Admin > Jobs to filter on running jobs to specific ones or to check specific job schedules.

Upon utilizing the Alteryx gallery to create and test an automation app in cooperation with other business areas, we found that the list of "recent modified files" that appears when selecting a file browse query has several issues, or areas in desperate need of improvement:

Not only does this list append new files to the bottom, resulting in a less than desirable experience when selecting files from this list across multiple occasions when testing, but the list eventually reaches a capacity where no new files can be shown. Furthermore, for processes that involve small modifications being made to a file or group of files that is fairly consistent in naming, a list of ambiguously named files will quickly cause confusion. If this type of small improvement is possible, please reach out to me about any avenues towards achieving it, or if there is a person or department to appropriately contact.

-John

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.

A maintenance mode would not be luxury, so that the worker does not take any more new job and finishes those which it has in progress. to be able to stop this one more easily.

Allow admins to configure an outage window(s) of a specified amount of time (say 5-6pm every sunday) for conducting admin activities. Specifically this outage window would block any scheduled jobs, drive any manual started jobs to queue, and also issue a popup on the gallery to notify users that it's during an outage window. 

Without a doubt, Schedule Forecast is a great feature. I feel Schedule Forecast feature should be enabled for Artisans as well who usually create new schedules on Alteryx Server. Artisans can look up the existing schedule details at a specific time and decide if it is best time for their workflow to run. It will be counter productive otherwise in my opinion as curators have to inform the artisan to move their schedule to some other time as there are several other workflows running at the exact time and impact execution time. 

Hi Team,

Earlier when we are in 2020.2 version we used to have "Company field" option when we are creating New Private Studio in the Subscription tab . Now we have Upgraded to 2020.4 version and we no longer see that option .

We have used Company Field to Tag the Solutions with certain specifications that would help us with the cost recovery mechanism.

So we need to have Option in our Use Case again.  If could you please include "Company Field" option in Subscription tab or if Subscription is deprecated then in Collection tab for coming versions it will help us a lot.

Currently you can only view the workflow results / history for other users workflows that are scheduled and the schedule is shared in the collection.

A lot of our workflows are set up to run on-demand, some as analytical apps and some as standard workflows. 

The first point of reference when a user experiences an issue should be to view the workflow results, but currently this is not possible and just gives an error "Access Denied" even when the tick box is selected within Workflow settings.

My suggestion is that you should be able to see the workflow results of any workflow that is shared with you (regardless of whether it is scheduled or run on-demand) as this would make fault finding and user support much easier.

Thanks

Rob