Alteryx Server Ideas

A better process Needed for Alteryx Backup and restore.

1. Why do we have to stop the service to do a backup,? We cannot stop a service in Enterprise platform just to do a backup.  we are not able to take backups because our jobs will be running 24X7 We Run jobs on Alteryx Server,
2. All of a Sudden our Windows server crashed and we lost all the data, The backup we have of Mongo DB was not perfectly restored on the new server which breaks the workflow, connections etc  due to encryption....
3. what is the purpose of backup if we cannot restore on a new server in case of DR

Please fix it ASAP,

I'm not sure if this is too similar to this server idea

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Ideas/Using-Microsoft-Flow-to-trigger-workflows/idi-...

but I'd love to see the ability to add webhooks to Alteryx Server to launch a workflow.  I believe that is how Flow (now PowerAutomate) can run an event.  I had to spend hours figuring out how to build a "Flow" workflow which would have taken me minutes in Designer.  For example, when I receive a new MS Forms Survey submission, I can shape the data and build a sharepoint list, rather than waiting for whatever interval I set in the scheduler.

I have a lot of workflows that depend on each other. Currently there's LOTS of hassle to effectively schedule a set of workflows to run subsequent.

Typically we run workflows (eg. product hierarchies) that would need to be completed before the next workflow should start (eg. sales data). We currently have some wonky workarounds that are high maintenance, but I would love to see this as a feature in the Gallery.

We have groups asking within our organization for ways to check the status of a running workflow in Gallery. They are wanting to understand which step in the process the workflow has completed for longer-running workflows.

They are looking for an experience similar to when running in Designer where they can see which tools have been completed. At the very least, they would like the log to be reported live and not shown at the end of the run.

Currently, the run feels like a black box where they do not know how close it is to completion or which steps it has made it through.

We have tried to build workarounds like the Email tool, but have been unsuccessful. For example, the Email tool does not send an Email until the workflow completes which defeats the purpose. The closest workaround is writing our own log along the way that can be reported on which is not a clean solution. 

We would like Gallery admins to be able to add any workflow to a collection - not just the workflows they authored.

The purpose is to have one collection where we have a set of workflows that were reviewed and approved for audits.

Only the reviewer could add to this collection

As an Admin, I would like to be able to see, from the Gallery, a single place where the history of workflows that have been run is displayed.  Right now I can only see workflows running or queued.  I would like to be able to look back at past executions and see status, runtime, errors, etc.

This data is currently available in Designer on our Alteryx Server.  But right now our system is just one environment.  I'm not sure if when we expand to multiple Gallery and Worker machines where I will have to look for workflow history.

Also, Workflow schedules can only be seen in Gallery, and not Designer.  So it would be nice to have everything in one place.

Everyone on our team would benefit from having access to each other's workflows -- including workflow results and scheduling -- but publishing them to gallery where any user in the company can run it/ download it would present a security issue. Functionality that is not met with Collections. I found a similar idea, but not anything that encompasses the whole thing.

It would be of immense value to have a Team Gallery - something intermediate to the company gallery and the private collection. This would enable our team to have access to modify, publish, schedule workflows as a team.

We have at the moment our server configured to work with SAML credentials. Whenever a user sets the credentials option to be "User must specify own credentials" the validation is performed using the servers own local user, giving out an error whenever some workflows with SSO data access are uploaded.

It would be great if a window would pop up or credentials could be configured for the validation to aviod seeing the error to show up.

This idea is to allow users to configure the file view option for a workflow running in the gallery that produces file outputs. Today, there are two views that a user can toggle between (see attachment), but I don't believe there's a way to change the default view. This idea is to change the setting as either a global gallery setting, on a workflow-by-workflow basis, or both.

We have end users that miss the drop down menu (and the file count next to the drop down, and the label we've added in the analytic app that says there will be two output files, and...), so they sometimes miss the second file entirely. Setting the default view to the "list view" rather than the drop down view could help alleviate that pain.

Note: The screenshots in the attachment show two Excel files that could be combined into one file with multiple tabs. This is a pain point for other workflows, as well, that produce outputs in multiple file formats.

HI All, 

In the Gallery Page under My Workspace-->Share With Me we could see the fields like Name, Type, Owner, Shared Source, Uploaded, Manual Runs. Among these we are not able to sort the fields "Type" and "Owner" alphabetically, whereas we are able to sort the other fields Name, Shared Source, Uploaded, Manual Runs accordingly. Kindly refer the attached snapshot. 

Regards, 

Ariharan R

My team utilizes the Gallery API extensively and have found that we have processes that the API has listed as actively running, but cannot be found via the Controller's GUI.  As a gallery artisan, I can call flows via API, but cannot cancel these executions unless I reach out to the administrator group to kill them manually. 

It would be extremely helpful to add an endpoint with the ability to submit a specific job GUID and have the server/controller kill the execution of that flow and clear up the server capacity.  This could then be scheduled on a regular basis as a maintenance  task to keep the server clean.

Thanks

In stead of having to create an event to notify me when workflows are failing, I would like to easily enable that option from gallery after scheduling a workflow.

When a user publishes and schedules a workflow on the gallery, they have the option to specify their time zone to ensure that the execution of the workflow occurs at the appropriate time. However, if the workflow invokes the DateTimeNow() function, the captured time is in UTC. If it is important for the end-user to have that time that is captured be in their local time zone, they will need to manually (either within the workflow or as a user input for an Analytic App) specify the offset from UTC.

Instead, there should be an Engine variable that captures the offset (or the time zone) that the workflow was executed from (or scheduled in), which can dynamically adjust the DateTimeNow() output appropriately.

On far too many occasions I have been working on a workflow in designer with either the outputs disabled via the configuration or using containers (preventing file creation/updating during testing) and I would save them back up to server without remembering to re-enable these outputs, which causes lots of issues down the line when users are trying to access these processes.

A simple warning on loading to the gallery that there are disabled tools and what tool id they are would mitigate this issue.

Sometimes a schedule is enabled that we want to disable. We edit the schedule, click the button to disable the schedule, click "Save". Then refresh the page and it's enabled still. The schedule will not disable in some cases. In the cases where it does get disabled, clicking the "Save" button appears to have no action. There's no confirmation and the screen stays static. Two suggestions:

• Have some UI response confirming that the changes have been saved.
• Provide an error message with explanation when the changes can't be saved (or just fix the bug)

When saving to our company's gallery, we must deselect dozens of assets for our numerous workflows every time they need to be resaved, which is very frequent.

I would like to suggest a select/deselect all button under manage workflow assets. This would save a considerable amount of time.

Thank you,
Daniel

The current Gallery API executes a job until it reaches a completion state with either success or failure.  Once reaching that state, the callout to /v1/jobs/{jobId}/ will return an array of messages that can then be parsed to gather information about the execution of the job, similar to the output you see in designer or via the CLI when running a job directly.

It would be nice if the callout to the jobs endpoint would constantly update and return the messages array with each callout.  With jobs that take longer to execute, our Gallery API wrapper could then report back to us and let us know what messages have come out as the jobs runs.  For example, if a process takes 2 hours to execute, we might want to know how far along the job is or if it has met a special condition that will cause it to run longer, etc.  To do that, we could add in message tools that report info messages to us.  Unfortunately, these messages are ineffective if we are running via the API because we won't see them until the job has fully completed.

It would be great to have an option to show intermediate output in gallery and allow user to modify that intermediate output before running the next step in a chained app environment.

This will come really handy in cleaning messy data which requires some manual input and user can complete their work form single gallery screen.

Currently the only way to achieve it is to build separate workflows/apps where first you have to download the messy data on your local drive and then upload it back via a separate workflow to complete the task.

As per design Alteryx Server retains all FAILED jobs in the Queue and Results collections even when we set the server to keep run history and results for x days

Purging records from Designer involves manual activity

Proposing the idea of purging these error records through automation script:

Step 1: Stop Alteryx Server

Step 2: Backup Mongo DB

Step 3: Replace big size files: AS_ResultsFiles.Files.bson, AS_Results.bson, AS_ResultsFiles.bson, AS_Queue.bson with Empty .bson files of same name in the backup/AlteryxService

Step 4: restore MongoDB from the backup (with the replaced files

Step 5: restart Alteryx service.