Alteryx Server Ideas

after run workflow in server, it has to download output files one by one. it very annoying when the number is huge.

please change like other platform like SharePoint etc. enable select all options and/or download all options.

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:

Currently when I log into the Gallery, I can see all of the users who are using license keys assigned to me.  I would love to be able to run some reports on usage and activation date as well as export the list of users to excel/csv.

-Dan

My company, a very large organization, is in the early implementation phase of Alteryx right now. My company requires frequent password changes and we plan on making heavy use of Shared Connections since there are also many shared data sources. Unfortunately, this would mean that every time a credential has changed that affects a workflow, the credential holder would have to contact Server Administration (me), and I would have to update any Shared Connections or other assets that use those credentials. This problem is exacerbated by also having to manage user permissions and which users belong in each Subscription Right now, that is not much of a big deal, but as the number of users begins to scale, this could become a very daunting task.

My current solution is to create Subscriptions for each Department, Group, or Team and give one person from that Subscription Curator permissions. This enables each Department to work more autonomously and reduces the load for Server Admin. The issue is that there is no permission level between the publishing rights of an Artisan and the ubiquitous acces of a Curator. So, with my solution, any one of the Subsription Curators can start using connections they're not supposed to have access to or deleting/stopping scheduled flows, intentionally or otherwise.

I propose that we find a middle ground between Curator and Artisan, a (Studio) Moderator. This person can be assigned one or more subscriptions by a full Curator and will have Curator-like permission, but only to the assigned Subscriptions. This means that they will be able to add/modify Credentials, Connections, and/or Scheduled under the envelope of their Subscriptions, but they won't have access to any others. I believe that this solution will mitigate the possible overflow of tedium to the true Curators while allowing the powerful communal features of Alteryx be used to their full potential.

Hello!

Currently one of the pain points when looking at integrating Alteryx Server into an organisation, is the role of a Curator, and who should be given that role. Of course, from an IT perspective, they want governance and control over data connections, users, and configuration - as it is important that users aren't simply able to change the default role to Curator and give all users access to the Administration portal, for instance. On the other hand, a Super User is typically given Curator access to allow for adjustments to all other sections of the Administrator Portal, that IT quite frankly don't care about.

What would be useful, is for a new role to be created, elevated from Curator. Let's call them 'Super Curator'. These 'Super Curators' (or, User-Curators, for a less exciting name) have access to all of the Admin portal as usual. 'Curators', would now only have access to the following (Highlighted yellow for Curator access):

This would aid the conversation from an IT perspective, allowing them to take control of user, data connection, and credential administration, whilst leaving the rest of the control to the other Curators. As this wouldn't always be a requirement, it would be useful to allow for a toggle of this setting within the Configuration on the Gallery. This would also not effect pre-existing setups of curators, as in the update of implementation, all current Curators should be adapted into 'Super Curators'.

Thanks,
TheOC

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 

Suggested information to be included in audit logs.

A secure audit record of all activities on the system:

1. General user access
2. User creates / modifies / archives / deletes data (ie: history on what the user did)
3. Administrator actions

At minimum the logs should include the following:

1. Unique user identifier
2. Unique data subject identifier
3. Function performed by the users
4. Date/time stamp of what was performed by user

I believe many customers could benefit from this type of audit logging, especially those who are required to obtain specific security certifications for their alteryx deployments.  From what I can see online there does not seem to be out of the box functionality for this. If anyone has implemented any type of audit logging like this please feel free to comment.

Thanks

-Vincent

In Gallery, I'd like to see the execution log in the workflow results, i.e. what you get if you run the workflow from Designer.  I'd like to see this whatever the status of the workflow completion.  Would be useful to assess warnings and the performance of components within the workflow.  Also would give me useful stats about records loaded etc.

For large implementations of Alteryx - you'd want to have a live control-center view that allows you to see:

- The state of health of all the server components

- the depth of the queue in the controller

- Jobs failing vs. succeeding.

While this can be done by running alteryx jobs, and by going and looking for problems - what we'd want is to have a heads-up control center view which is self-refreshing all the time so that administrators can be notified when there are issues.    And this should not be e-mail notification (it's too easy to miss an e-mail or an SNMP alert)

Think about a 40 inch monitor on a wall (like in a traffic control center)  that allows the server management team to see the state of health of the plant at a glance, and dive into issues without having to constantly be looking for them.    this is a critical capability for enterprise install-base and would be a very useful capability to add to the platform.

I would like the ability to add a workflow description on Alteryx server.  This step would be done after the workflow is published, this way future edits can be made without having to republish the workflow.  A checkbox to allow HTML content would also be appreciated.

Good Day.

We would like a built-in process that would search or, and resolve, workflows that are stuck in the "initializing" state. These seem to happen for various reasons but communication problems between the controller and workers .. usually a socket timeout.. which appears  to be most problematic. It seems  that these type of errors should be expected in all but the most stable environments,

Currently, the only tool that we have to solve this problem is to restart the Alteryx Service on the controller and while this works there tendency to cause some collateral damage in workflows ...erroring or restarting from their beginning.

There may be a way to solve this without restarting the service by editing Mongo using a tool like Robo 3T but that is unproven and has its own risk.

After dealing with this issue and struggling for quiet some time we think that the best option is to implement a "clean up" DB process that will run every 5 min or so, capture a list of workflows in the "initializing" state , then compare that list to one in the next 5 min cycle and fix any workflows that appear in both lists. We think that returning  any stuck workflows to the queued state would be the best Fix  option.

We just don't want to continue to use Restart the Service process to solve this issue and accept the collateral damage.

Thank you for your consideration

Tom D  

For scheduled jobs, there should be an option to include performance profiling in output logs globally.  Basically we are looking at how we can understand which custom macros are in use, and in which workflows, and one way to do this would be to get the output logs into another tool (i.e., splunk), and then set up some queries there.  It would work, but I would have to tell N developers to go set performance profiling on, re-upload their workflows, ect.  

But why not have a switch on server / gallery that just turns this feature on globally for every scheduled workflow?  

Thank you for attending my TED talk on why performance profiling should have an option to be set globally. 

In the gallery you have the ability to replace a workflow with another, however when doing so the version history only indicates "Package Replaced" (see image below)

Would it be possible to change the default text and input something more meaningful, since in my case I use this field for version control/auditing so it would be good to know what changes came with the replaced version.

Second ask, but maybe not as important as the first.

Sometimes the package we are replacing with itself might have several versions, but these are completely lost when the files are combined.

Would it be possible to keep that version history when the package is replaced.

Eg. Original File is at Version 10. This will be replaced by a package that is at Version 3.

Possible solution would be to have the new version be Version 13 which includes the 10 versions from the original file and the 3 from the new. 

Thanks!

I have Designer Apps that work really well using the Browse tool to provide the outputs to display and download in the Apps.

This does not work when I push the Apps to Server.

I find this very restricting and would like to suggest that the Browse Tool be enable to generate its outputs in Server Apps.

I would like the Browser outputs to be enabled for download into Excel, PDF, etc as well so the Server Apps behave in a similar way to the same Apps in Designer.

Hey Alteryx Dev Gurus - 

I've got a situation wherein the user runs something in Gallery, and complains.  I have to log in as that user to view the output files that came back out.  As a super user, I should be able to have all seeing ability!  Thanks!

brian

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.

each canvas in our environment goes through initial dev; then a testing phase; then into production usage after completing testing & peer review.

Currently the server environment has no concept of progression or promotion so we have to set up our own Dev; UAT; and Prod gallery & server - this really is very clunky because assets have to be manually copied across.

What would be more effective is:

- Allow a single asset to have a lifecycle (like you do in GIT) - so that it can go through dev and testing as a branch of the main code

- Once ready - user then changes the lifecycle type to "testing" or "UAT" and pushes it to users

- Once signed off, the user then promotes this to a production flow, and it replaces the current production version

There are a few areas where we'd need to do some thinking (dependancy tracking; branching; changing connection details as you promote so that you can hit the prod data stores etc) - but fundamentally this would go a VERY long way towards eliminating much of the admin involved in running the gallery.

We've confirmed with @KevinP that the Alteryx Gallery / Server API does not currently support downloading canvasses in unzipped data-stream format. (https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Discussions/Server-API-Download-packages-for-surveil...)

Please can we add an API end-point that allows the following:

• Connect to the gallery and download a canvas; along with all of its sub-canvasses and helper macros. 
• Format required:
  • Plain XML (not zipped)
  • Provided in a data stream so that we can perform analytics and surveillance on this data
  • Fields required
    
    • Canvas filename
    • Application ID
    • Some unique ID per macro / sub-macro
    • XML for the canvas
    • Last run date
    • Last changed date
    • Environment (this is important once Server actually allows a Dev; UAT; Prod progression cycle - so we can see which environment people are in)
    • User details who uploaded
    • User details who are marked as the owners
    • Any other meta-tags on the canvas (important once server allows for meta-tagging of canvasses for categorisation)

Current API only allows this to be downloaded to a zipped file; which then needs to be unzipped; and then loaded back into a data stream.

Thank you

S

CC: @revathi @AshwiniChezhiyan @LizaNemchynova 

Hi there,

Currently, when we download a version of Alteryx - we need to download a very large number of binaries across many different download locations.    Once we get these in, they need to go through InfoSec audits; then be packed for deployment etc.     this creates a very large admin overhead in that folk need to check for updates across multiple binaries and also create a significant number of different installs which then need to be rolled out across hundreds of workstations.

The request would be to change the approach to downloads for enterprise customers:

- Admin logs into the download portal

- They then select the components which they need (Designer; predictive; CREW macros; Microsoft starter pack; Tableau starter pack; JIRA connector from the gallery; additional predictive tools from the gallery)

- this then becomes the defined selection set.

- When any of these items are updated - the admin is notified

- When they download - these are then all built into a single installer binary which we can then download and roll out to all our workstations.

Many thanks

Sean

cc: @dataMack @adrianloong