Alteryx Server Ideas

Our Organization uses a Password Manager to automate the update of service account credentials used in Windows Services. 

Would like to request the ability to leverage that functionality with the Run As user inside of Alteryx Server Settings used with Workflows. 

This would increase application security, while ensuring the process is automated, thereby limiting issues from human interaction.

Examples of these types of application are ERPM(Enterprise Random Password Manager), Thycotic Secret Server, and I am sure there are others. 

The WebDAV protocol isn't supported by the Alteryx Scheduler,  due to the security constraints associated with connecting to SharePoint.  This is a server side limitation that should be aligned with the ability of the desktop to preform the WebDAV action.  

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.

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

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.

In some organizations, it may be difficult, if not impossible, for permissions to be applied or exemptions made to enable wide ranges of users the “Logon as batch job” permission needed to run workflows in a Server with the current run-as credential capability.

If possible, could the Alteryx process still run as the server admin or "Run As" account, but enable the workflow to access the various different data sources (windows authentication) using specific credentials entered when running the workflow. So while the whole process runs as Service Account A, the access to databases, file systems, etc. may be done using their own specified credentials.

Some of this can be accomplished today by embedding credentials in database connections, but this isn’t an ideal scenario, and a more holistic solution that covers a wider array (or all supported) data sources would be preferred.

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.

Would it be possible to specify whether a worker handles scheduled jobs, ad-hoc jobs or both?  Right now it seems that the workers treat both types of jobs the same, meaning that a slew of ad-hoc jobs initiated from the Gallery could slow down jobs that are scheduled to run on a regular cadence.  It'd be great if those scheduled jobs could have a dedicated worker (or workers) and have any ad-hoc jobs handled by a separate worker (or workers) so that the scheduled jobs (which might be more important) are not held up by one-off jobs.

Can we make the ability for a developer using Alteryx Designer and having a workflow using in-DB tools to pass along their credentials with the workflow when scheduling to run on Alteryx Server.  An individual user may have access to only certain tables in Teradata for example and the ODBC connection on Server may not have access to the same tables so we need to be able to pass along the encrypted credentials.  THanks!

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.

Hello,

I've used a standard configuration to set up an Alteyx server. The gallery is available at https://alteryx.samplecompany.com/gallery

I'd would be really helpful if you enable to create a landing page at https://alteryx.samplecompany.com/ and add a possibility to host add extra pages. The easiest way to do this is to add an option to the Alteryx Server configuration wizard and read the pages from Alteryx workspace location.

Additionally, such landing page should have redirection from HTTP to HTTPs.

Best,

Piotr

While Alteryx is a self-service tool for the business there is a need for administrators to get a little more insight to the usage of the installation on the server. Each customer is forced to create their own monitoring tools. I understand NewRelic and Cloudwatch can easily be used but there is a need to split the admin view by organization departments since each dept needs their own resource utilization and workflow report. Logical split view reporting should be facilitated by the Alteryx server product.

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.

We get a lot of comparisons with DataStage ETL and what Alteryx can do. DataStage has the capability to partition queries and run on multiple worker nodes to allow the execution to be more efficient and faster than if it ran on one worker. We want similar capability on Alteryx as our case study shows right now that Alteryx is 10X slower than a query ran on DataStage through the GRID.

Hello,

This issue relates to an inability to input data from a database where access to only certain columns is permitted. This is due to PII data being present in the data.

I am trying to pull data from one table at a time using the standard ‘Input Data’ tool. 

As I do not have table level access I am explicitly specifying the column names and not using a wildcard. Please see the example below, query highlighted in yellow and the returned error in red. You will see the error message returned from Alteryx suggests a * wildcard has been used despite specifying the exact fields to pull.

Several of the Ford GDIA team and Ford HPC team have reviewed this with me and cannot assist. The HPC team believe it is a bug in Alteryx which has been reported by other users internally, that is ‘Select *’ commands being sent from Alteryx despite specific columns being outlined in the query to the data lake. As we only have access to specific fields within Ranger (due to PII data) the select * fails and returns an error.

I can confirm my ODBC connections are all set correctly as I can pull from certain tables where I have full table level access but not others. Access rights are all in place as I can use the same query on Ambari without issue.

Thank you for any assistance you can provide,

Michael Higgins

Example Query

Select STATION_ID, STATION_DESC from dsc60082_qlscm_tz_db.qlsc_station limit 10

Info: Input Data (3): ODBC Driver version: 03.80

Error: Input Data (3): Error SQLPrepare: [Hortonworks][Hardy] (97) Error occurred while trying to get table schema from server. Error: [Hortonworks][Hardy] (80) Syntax or semantic analysis error thrown in server while executing query. Error message from server: Error while compiling statement: FAILED: HiveAccessControlException Permission denied: user [mhiggi37] does not have [SELECT] privilege on [dsc60082_qlscm_tz_db/qlsc_station/*]

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Hi Michael,

I believe it would require turning off the queries we currently run to retrieve metadata and retrieving metadata only for the columns selected in the query.

Please submit to our Idea Center for consideration.  Thanks!

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Angela Ogle | Customer Support Engineer

Currently, Alteryx Server has a setting for how many days to keep Results from scheduled workflows, which prevents your Results log from getting too large.

Unfortunately, this setting is universal to all workflows, regardless of schedule.  If you have monthly jobs sharing a server with jobs that run every 5 minutes (which we currently do), and you set your limit to 30 days, you get at most 1 result from monthly jobs, but 8,640 results from your 5-minute jobs!

A better option would be to keep the most recent X results from any schedule (where X is user-configurable).

The AlteryxService addtoqueue command is great, but it leaves me wanting more.  My simple use case is to run WorkflowB via the addtoqueue command in an after run event from WorkflowA, which is run daily.  The result is that i end up with a cluttered scheduler with many instances of WorkflowB that i need to manually clean up, since addtoqueue creates a new record in AS_Applications each time it runs

It would be useful if there was an AlteryxService command for each of the subroutines already built in to the scheduler front end app: schedule workflow, update workflow, add workflow, remove workflow, edit schedule, etc

MongoDB objects could be identified by oid which the user can get from querying the AlteryxService database

I don't want to rebuild what you've already built, just need a little more control over it 🙂

When replacing an app in the gallery, it appears that you always see the original upload date (which is good to have), and then simply a version number.  It would be great if you could add an additoinal field that shows the most recent replace date.  That way you would know that "SampleApp v4" is the 4th replacment, and that 4th replacement happened on date mm/dd/yyyy.  Also, while it's replacing, there is no indication that it is doing the replace.  An hour glass or some indicator telling you to sit tight would be nice.

Hi,

As part of enterprise alteryx server deployments, would it be possible to remove alteryx server controller tokens and use asymmetric certificates (X509) instead?

Adrian