Alteryx Server Ideas

Good Day

We need a way to read a workflow log file while the workflow is running .. we want to peek inside the log file to see what is happening in the workflow, especially for the  case when the workflow seems to be "hung". This would be an invaluable troubleshooting tool.

Currently these worklfow log files are locked by Windows and are inaccessible by all but unapproved 3rd part utilities .. if at all.

Often these logs disappear if the workflow needs to be deleted in order to save the environment

It is noted that the service logs do not exhibit this behavior, so the request is to

1) allow the running workflow logs to have the same behavior as the service logs

2) provide a work around to allow reading of the running workflow logs

3) ?????

Thank you for thinking about this

Tom D

In order to migrate workflows from our UAT environment to a Production server environment, we are looking for an API capability to work with the server:

- Query canvasses by name or ID (to get a list of canvasses)

- Extract Canvas to a particular location (by ID)

- Upload canvas including dependancies (with parameters for team; collection; etc)

This would assist with automating the UAT to Prod process until Alteryx Promote can step into this gap.

CC: @rijuthav @jithinmony @HengHe @RajK @ydmuley @revathi @Deeksha @MPistone @Ari_Fuller @Arianna_Fuller @JoshKushner @samnelson @avinashbonu @Sunder_Sriram @Rahul_Thakur @Rahul_Singh 

The Alteryx Server Usage Monitoring & Reporting  reports are very useful. In order to automate the distribution and leverage our Tableau Server we have modified one of the macros within to publish the TDE to the Server and reworked the workbook to point to it. This is a fairly time consuming process to do, so the idea is to introduce a version of the workflow which pushes the datasource, producing a version of the workbook pointing to it.

There is a strong need for more APIs to be introduced in Alteryx Server so that our Admin teams can provide automated solutions to our users. My understanding is that a lot of these will be introduced into Alteryx Analytics Hub however, it is also needed in Alteryx Server.

I would propose that the internal APIs for Collections and Scheduler be exposed to the Admin Key/Secrets so that we can use these APIs to move our Users workflows directly to their collection or automatically schedule for them, if needed. It seems that all this would take would be to release the Authorization from internal to the Admin on the API.

APIs I am requesting be released:

• PUT .../gallery/api/collections/{collectionID}/apps/{appID}/
• POST .../gallery/api/scheduler/

Analytics Gallery needs the ability to save my question choices - so I don't need to re enter them every time I run the app.

User who share Apps/Workflows with other users in a collection are not able to see the results of the other users executions directly in the gallery.

Could you please add the possibility to share workflow results in the Alteryx Gallery?

Currently the e-mail settings for the server are set up using a wizard and are not available within the admin UI.

Please could you add an explicit section to the Admin UI to allow the admin team to set up approved SMTP settings, allowing this all to be managed in one admin console.

Further: Can you allow the admins to push these settings down to the desktop users.   This would allow the admin team to control the SMTP usage and prevent data leakage.   It would also reduce complexity for the user since the SMTP settings are all pre-set making eMail tools; and Events easier to set up.

On Success --> Do This

On Fail --> Do that

The lack of control and flexibility around the scheduler seems to cause people to bury the logid down in runner macros or unnessarily poll custom log tables to see if a status has changed.

I am aware of a couple of clients calling for this functionality. This can be performed via command line but it realy needs to be in the scheduler options.

We currently have the ability to store connections on the server which protects the credentials - however this capability does not exist for APIs for Sharepoint sites etc.

Please could you extend this to cover authentication for ALL connectors?

Many thanks

Sean

cc: @revathi

I like to be able to access and run my apps from my iPhone.

Hi,

I have described my issue in the Community post here:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Connect-Gallery/Version-Management-in-Gallery/m-p/120319#M3...

Is there a way to retrieve an exact date when new version of a workflow was uploaded to Gallery? I know it works when it is today, yesterday or couple days ago but after that you can only see "2 months ago" etc. in Creation Date, which is not sufficient for any version management.

Thank you

We spent almost a full day on Friday internally, and also about 3 or 4 hours of time for 3 Alteryx Server engineers (thank you all - MattH; ZachH; WayeW) and Ben Burkholder trying to get our gallery server to start.

Error message was "

Failed to construct Gallery daemon process, process exited code <9002>

This was all that was provided in the server log files; the gallery log files; and the Windows Event Viewer.

In the end, it turned out that the issue was very simple - the MongoDB had open locks in place that needed to be deleted; and then the service came up immediately.

Several man-days of our effort; as well as the precious time of the Alteryx Engineers who gave up their Friday afternoon to help could have all been avoided if the error-message on the server failure said "Login failure on server due to open locks - please clean out locks on db.locks collection" with a link to the solution or a lookup code that be researched on the Alteryx support site.     

Please could we go through the server service and eliminate all the exit codes and replace with human-friendly error messages - that way we could allow this kind of issue to be self-diagnosed, and allow the Alteryx Engineers to spend their time building the next generation of Alteryx Server rather than diagnosing a table lock.

cc: @avinashbonu @revathi @Deeksha @BenBu @WayneWooldridge @MattH @SteveA @ZachH 

Please support SAML 2.0 for gallery

Add Admin ability to place the Alteryx Service (Engine) into Maintenance mode allowing current workflows to complete, but all new workflow processing moved into Queue to allow for server configuration and/or maintenance.

Currently, if I want to make a small configuration change (like a memory setting in the Runtime settings) I have to hunt for a quiet window or the lowest level of activity to kill the service (and the running jobs).

It would be helpful to flip a 'switch' and have all new jobs go into 'Queue' allowing for the change and service stop/restart ... then pick right back up with the queue in configured order. (execution time, priority level, etc...)

Admin settings for the Alteryx server are currently split between the Admin GUI in the gallery (screenshot 1 below) and a tool called "Alteryx System Settings" (screenshot 2 below).

Please could you move all of the system settings into the Admin section of the GUI.   Not only will this allow an admin to administer the settings remotely (rather than having to be logged into the actual server with an interactive login which is needed now) - it will also consolidate them into one place which makes things easier for admins to ensure that all settings are set up correctly.

This could be done progressively - a little bit in every release - over the next couple of releases, it does not need to be done in a big reengineering or a massive big-bang release (in fact - progressive release is much more favourable since you learn along the way and big-bang releases are well known to be failure prone).

cc: @TanyaS 

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

As Alteryx leans more into the Data Science space - it becomes more important to be able to keep rich documentation of the project along with the Alteryx Asset.    This does also require the concept of a "project" on the alteryx server, which would allow for meta-tags; and various different documents to be added with the project.

This would include things like Requirement documents; test evidence; test data sets etc.

This would extend Alteryx from a data prep engine to more of a data-science workbench as different user groups can participate in a specific project.

As users change roles; or possibly even leave the firm - we need to automatically manage the ownership of their and their permission.

- We need to be able to export all permissions and ownership of assets by user using an API

- We then need to be able to revoke permissions using an API (we have a central entitlement management process that this can be tied into)

- we also need to trigger a revoke on all licenses via API.

If done within Alteryx server:

- When a dept code on a user changes; or user leaves - trigger an invalidate on all assets.

- Workflow to both the primary and secondary owner to ask for a new owner

- Also automatically trigger a revoke on all licenses

Alteryx Server does a pretty good job of tracking all the information you need in order to find out who ran a workflow at a given time, even if that workflow has been deleted from the Gallery.

However, if I need to identify what that workflow actually did on a specific date, and that version is no longer available on the Gallery, it gets really hard to track down.

There are some posts throughout the community on leveraging the MongoDB to try and reconstruct this, but in some cases the workflow is "Chunked" and becomes impossible for an end user to reconstruct.

I spoke to support about this recently and they suggested that by using the Scheduler, I could schedule the historical instance of the workflow and then "Really quickly" grab it when it was reconstructed from the temporary staging folder used by our Alteryx Server.  This has a few concerns, among them, finding a way to run this workflow so that the files can be created but it has no impact on tables, for instance if the given workflow drops a table as part of its execution.  Additionally, the only way to schedule with a different set of permissions in a 1-Worker environment is to change the default "Run Workflows As" to a different user, who also needs permission to access all files on the Alteryx Server.  This can also impact any other Scheduled or Gallery job that is executed while this recovery is underway, effectively causing downtime to do file recovery.

These restrictions are specific enough as to be impractical for most organizations using Alteryx Gallery/Server.

I think this could be solved by adding to the Scheduler an option along the lines of "Download a copy of the workflow", available to administrators. Ideally this copy could include some important metadata, like when that version of the workflow was uploaded, who uploaded it, and its ID/Version Number from the Gallery.

This would go a long way towards making it easier to Audit and respond to requests for historical information about Alteryx Workflows on the Server, and since the Alteryx Engine can already recreate these workflows, I think that a basic version of this feature could simply save out that temporary file, rather than executing it.