Alteryx Server Ideas

We are taking an incremental feed of all server canvasses in order to look for patterns - however there is no option on the server admin APIs (the Workflow API specifically) that allow you to filter by date.

Please can you add to this API to allow API users to specify an upload/updated date filter and only take items after this date.

cc: @jalvarezv

@SteveA did an article about server logging a few years ago which was very helpful.

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Engine-Works-Blog/A-deeper-dive-into-Server-logging/ba-p/22389

... and in the training events at Inspire this year there was a session on how to find and interpret server logs.

it would be very useful for large server environments to move away from discrete log files as much as possible, and instead move towards a world where the logs are stored in a data format, and one logging infra is used for all so that an admin team can see these all in one place.

Granted - the initial boot-up of a server, where it needs to connect to the logging DB is going to be a challenge - but after this initial primary boot sequence it would be great if all server logs and logging events were stored in a database of some kind so that we can analyze and collect events.     That way, server admins can have a great UI experience; as well as a great analytical experience without having to regex through multiple different .LOG files.

Currently there are certain locations on server that are paginating content results:

• /gallery/#!apps/studio
• /gallery/admin/#!apps
• /gallery/admin/#!subscriptions
• /gallery/admin/#!users

Each of these pages require users to either know exactly what they want to find by using keyword filtering or know exactly what page they want to go to and use the bottom arrows/page numbers to navigate to that page. Ditching pagination for something more intuitive helps users that may not be as acclimated with the depth of content when there are a lot of results, and also saves users multiple click interactions to find what they want.

There are tons of solutions for this, but infinite scroll is the most user-friendly & least taxing server & client side.

https://infinite-scroll.com/ has code & examples, and jquery seems to be the most widely used implementation.

As a system admin, I need a simple, reliable way to back up the Alteryx Server without shutting it down first. A hot-backup (and restore) utility that includes a consistent copy of MongoDB plus any other server config files would allow me to do this.

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.

When a process is running in foreground, the GUI does an excellent job of giving feedback to the user as to which "step" the job is running and how much data is processing through the active tools.  When that same job is scheduled, the amount of information is limited to when the job began execution.

If a tool was able to give checkpoint status out to the user, we could better monitor the progress of scheduled jobs.  The visibility to the job is most important for long running jobs.  We've unfortunately had instances where we have had to cancel jobs and to restart them not knowing how close or how far from finishing they were.

Thanks for your consideration,

Mark

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.