Alteryx Server Ideas

There is no good way to get server user credentials into a workflow without asking them for it in an App interface.  It would be great if we could have a built in Constant that could be used to silently pass user credentials into a workflow for things like API's or logging user information.

I was reading a post on the Community (http://community.alteryx.com/t5/Publishing-Gallery/Macro-sharing-Best-practice/m-p/38330) which reminded me of an idea that I had.

It would be really nice if a Gallery location could be used as a "Macro Search Path" so that macros don't need to be downloaded from the Gallery and saved locally to be used in a workflow.

So in addition to going to Options>User Settings>Edit User Settings>Macros and adding a local/network path, you could add your internal gallery information...

The shared data connections from the Gallery have been very helpful in centralizing data connection information between desktop users and their workflows when saved to the Gallery. The In-DB tools currently cannot take advantage of the Gallery Data Connections and require a completely separate setup that is both confusing and adds additional connection management work for creation/password changes. 

It would be a great enhancement to Alteryx if all connections for the different types of tools could be centrally managed from the shared Data Connections manager found in the Gallery.

Best regards,

Ryan

I would like to collaborate with my team, but also maintain my own personal private studio.

Is that on the road map?

-Dan

Hello,

The Analytics team for our company services 9 different lines of business, and it would be helpful to create sub folders within each line of business. It would be helpful to be able to restrict the access for each individual sub folder also. Our team deals with different teams within each line of business, and they may need to have different access due to sensitive content. 

Thanks,

Erik M

It would be nice to have an inbuilt function(s) that return an identifier (NTLogin for instance when the gallery is setup with windows auth) of the user running the app on the gallery.

Functions like - USERNAME(), DOMAINNAME() etc., helps.

I know that it can be achieved via the "__cloud:UserId" call , which is not officially supported by alteryx. It adds value if it is inbuilt within the product itself.

Regards,

Sandeep.

If a job fails it would be perfect if we could set something in the workflow settings so that the job would retry again in X number of minutes for the next Y number of times. We have jobs that connect to external resources and sometimes the network will reset and will cause the connections to all drop. An example would be I want a workflow to try again in 10 minutes for a maximum of 5 times so over the next 50 mins it will retry every 10 mins if it fails

It would be good to have a new field with the owner of the data connection, when users asks to be part of a data connection, we should know who is the identified owner to contact and ask for approval.

Thanks.

Regards

Joana Santos

Alteryx Designer is an amazing data tool but it’s partner, "the Scheduler" needs some much needed upgrades. The Scheduler interface that pops up from Alteryx Designer does need a complete make over. I’m not going to address this but rather focus on the functionality that if delivered makes the Scheduler much more useful. 

Today I’m reading our Mongo db scheduler data using an Alteryx workflow and Tableau to show what’s happening on the Scheduler. This dashboard is what we refer to frequently to see the health of our companies data pipeline.  I’ll share both files soon. 

Here are the top 5 features for the Scheduler.

1. Workflow priority ranking. When two or more workflows are scheduled to run at the same time, ‘priority’ sets the order of execution. Priority is set at the time of scheduling the workflow. Values range from 1 to 100. If a priority is not set the default is 50. The ‘priority’ field can be read from Mongo db. 

Why: At midnight we set off several workflows. We want to centrally manage which runs first based on a common ‘priority’ field. 

2. Restrict which controller and workers a specific workflow can run on. Default is to run on all servers. At the time of scheduling a workflow can designated to restrict which server to execute on. This creates a field called ‘restrict’ which server it cannot execute on. 

Why: Some workflows only run on the main controller due to file system references. Also a worker can be tuned for CPU or Disk I/O and workflows that can benefit from this tuning.  Selecting a disk I/O intensive workflow to run on a server tuned for Disk I/O would speed up our workflows. 

3. Set sequence of successfully completed workflows. 

FYI: We used the Runner tool for a short time to resolve this issue but learned quickly that the Runner tool is like a bull in a china shop and brought our server down. The runner tool as it is today is not an option for production work.

Why: This would allow you to run several workflows one after another. For example the first would read from a data source, the second would do calculations on the data and the third workflow would publish the data. All workflows are given a ‘workflow-number’ which can be seen in the scheduler list and read from Mongo db. 

4. If a workflow fails you can set the number of attempts to run successfully. Report attempts greater than 1 in a new field called ‘attempts’ that can be read from the Mongo db. 

Why: Some workflows fail and if attempted to run again may work. This includes issues with locked files and workflows dependent on processes outside of Alteryx. 

5. If a workflow runs more than X minutes the scheduler kills the workflow and reports a workflow error with a unique code called ‘execution-limit’.  This code can be read in the mongo db. The defaut is 90 minutes and can be set to any number of minutes. Each workflow can have it’s own limit. 

Why: Some workflows start to hog resources and need to be killed. If a new workflow is added this is a good way to protect the overall scheduled workflows. 

Currently the server diagnostics (http://localhost/gallery/admin/#!diagnostics) covers a narrow time window (from what I can see - only the last few hours)

.... and if you attempt to zoom out or pan to see a broader time window - the graph gets smaller, but the data does not grow to fill the remaining space

Please could we request 2 changes:

a) add a time axis on the bottom of this chart so that the user can understand the time dimension 

b) Increase the time available for analytics to an arbitrarily broad set of data (which the admin can configure as a server setup parameter - retention period).   For us - we'd want to keep at least 3 months of data, and be able to view this analytically.

Thank you 

Sean

If two users sit in the same studio and have multiple scheduled workflows in that studio, both users can see the results of those schedules under "Workflow Results" -> "My Jobs"/"Jobs Shared with Me" 

It gives both users in the studio good visibility of all the workflow results they have access to.

Now if we move to a 1 studio-1 user environment and share workflows and schedules via collections, this "Workflow Results" -> "Jobs Shared with Me" functionality is empty. Instead users have to go to each schedule individually to see the results from them there. 

So if you're in a 1 studio-many users environment, there is a single place to go to see all workflow results. But if you're in a 1 studio-1 user environment and sharing via collections, you have to go to infinitely many places to see the results of all the schedules shared with you.

So my idea is to have results from schedules shared via collections appear in Workflow Results.

I have been trying to scan all of the workflows that are stored in the gallery and wrote this community post about it. Some Alteryx employees reached out to me directly to see if they could help solve my problem. We ended up with a somewhat wonky roundabout solution (that I haven't implemented yet) by downloading yxzp files through the Gallery API, unzipping them, then scanning the workflows as xml. I think the process could be greatly simplified if Alteryx had a set of Introspective tools.

The introspective tools would use similar, if not the same, processes that Alteryx already has in place to pull data from the gallery/server itself. The set of tools would be most useful for Server admins or people that are trying to build meta-workflows for Alteryx to make things easier for their users. Similar to the solution to my problem above, most of this functionality can be worked around by querying the Mongo and/or scanning engine logs. The Introspective tools would simplify this process greatly, especially when it comes to joining records from the Mongo and collecting workflow-internal data.

Since the tools will have direct access to the gallery/server it would make sense that they would only be available to machines with server licensing or could be made available if the user has a high enough permission level in the gallery they are trying to obtain data from.

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.

Currently the Private Gallery product has 2 authentication options - AD and built in. 

If an organization uses AD, this solution is fine, however there are many origanizations who use other standard directory systems. One of the more common directory/authentication systemsis LDAP due to its wide adoption and cross platform compatibility. 

It would be fantastic to have functionality similar to the AD integration, however with LDAP for Gallery authentication and user management. 

Best regards,

Ryan

Hi,

I've got an app in my company's gallery that I've updated 11 times, so in the gallery it says "version 11". I noticed when I click on that area, it brings up a window that shows all 11 of the apps I've uploaded over time, with options to make them the published version & to download. This confused me since each time I update the app I get a warning saying the app will be deleted, which is what I want.

So for this app, I have a 800MB file within it, which would mean that on my gallery server I have 11 versions of an app that each contain at a minimum 800MB of data. I've recently been told by support that this is as it's intended, and if I want to get rid of the all the different versions, I should deleted the app entirely and start anew. This of course would change the URL to the app, requiring the updating of documentation and redistribution of that documentation to over 100 users. And I lose the number of times the app has been run, which doesn't work for me.

My idea is to have another option in the window that shows all the different versions with the options to download, but this option would be to delete previous versions...COMPLETELY, knowing that the owner would no longer have the option to download the version or make it the published version. Having this would allow the owner to maintain the original app with the option of dropping previous versions that are really not wanted anymore.

I have been looking at the content in Alteryx Public Gallery for some time and I have had some concerns about the safety and usability of the macros/workflows in the gallery. 

I think there should be an option to rate, review and provide feedback on stuff that is out there on the public gallery. This will be helpful in many different way.

1. It will generate trust about the workflow/app. If I see that something is rated higher and has been used and commented by a lot of users I am more inclined to use it
2. It will provide a lot of ideas on how a particular workflow/macro can be used in different ways 
3. Review/Feedback will help the author to make changes as required or suggested by users.
4. The macro's will probably show up in google search based on key words provided by users in their reviews.

......

I had initiated a thread some time ago related to this, there is some useful information in there if someone has same concerns.

 https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Connect-Gallery/Can-Apps-and-Macros-in-Alteryx-public-Galle...

Thanks,

Ashish