Alteryx Server Ideas

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

I'd love the ability to have one schedule for a workflow at specific times. 

Currently you have to create 4 different schedules if you'd like a workflow to run at 10 am, 3 pm, 5:30 pm and 11:30 pm and doing this makes the "Scheduled Workflow" section of the server not only cluttered, but a lot more difficult to manage.  (like spotting accidentally duplicated schedules- which also happens more often than i'd like :)

Thanks!

When installing and configuring Alteryx, the wizard allows the administrator to select the Gallery authentication to be used among:

Built-in

Integrated Windows authentication

Integrated Windows authentication with Kerberos

SAML authentication

The note states:

Once an authentication type has been selected, it should not be changed. Changing it may cause technical problems.

The gallery manual states "Once an authentication type has been selected it should not be changed or Gallery functionality may be compromised." 

https://help.alteryx.com/server/current/admin/Configuration/SystemSettings/Gallery.htm?Highlight=%22...

If you are reading this idea suggestion, I hope it is not too late for you. Why allow the user to change the authentication method once the install is completed? What are the options to solve this?

One option would be to grey-out the "Authentication Type" section in the  "Gallery Authentication" screen, so the user is not able to change authentication methods once after the first configuration is set. This would still allow the user to change SAML settings.

Another option, if somehow there is a reason why a user would want to change authentication types even though it is not supported, what about changing the layout to make it more difficult to change the authentication type.

What are your other suggested changes?

This is not relevant if this idea is implemented https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Ideas/Allow-changing-of-Gallery-Authentication-witho...

However, I would imagine that a UI change would be a lot easier to implement that supporting overhauling the user management in the MongoDB.

Would like to see a Notification hierarchy implemented to Gallery. Currently, the settings that control notifications are at the Gallery-level....where only the admin can control, for example, notifying users if a new workflow was added to a collection they belong too. Could this setting be inherited, but then, for example, a Collection owner can implement their own notification settings that overrides the Gallery default? Using the same example as before, perhaps the Collection owner could disable notifying their Users if a new workflow is loaded to the collection.

Nick

While working with Alteryx Server, I noticed that there is no way for an Premium Artisan to organize the workflow results. With processes that are running hourly, each day, the workflow results gets very cluttered with the same things, and it takes some time to clean up. It would be nice to add a search bar that would filter out workflow results dependent on what you are entering in the textbar. Below is a very lo fi mock up. The spot where I entered "dispositionReport" at the top is the text bar that filters the workflow results below it. The red lines are simulating the removal of said records. Then offer a select all option to then delete all of the workflow results records. 

Hi there,

we are in a dynamic team where people move from 1 project to the other that implies moving series of workflows from private studio to collections prior to sharing. I have not found other ways but to do that 1 by 1 with very limited ways to filter the flows.

Could there be, from the collection, a way to 

 - increase number of possibilities to filters to find the proper flows (or maybe just simply allow folders in the Private studio)

 - be able to multi select the one to add / delete from / to the collection

thanks,

Mongocontroller.log during its MongoDB dump processing records DB admin password in clear text.    This poses a security risk now only to the company but to the MongoDB itself. 

Is there a security patch ready to be pushed out to eliminate this risk?

Insights should work like Apps. We should be able to publish insights then grant permission to other people/studios to access the visualizations. I have many clients / users that can benefit from having access to the Insights i'm gathering from Alteryx. 

As part of the Persistence Expiration processes, within Designer we have the ability to set a retention threshold of the results tab.   i.e. 30 days.

After enabling this - all completed results are purged  but all the "error" results remain.  And this depending on the original count can run into the thousands, such as in my environment.   Id like to see the "Error" results become part of the clean up processing because of the following reasons:

1.  We do not have dedicated admins that have time to manually or by group delete these error result items.

2.  Most if not all - errors are resolved immediately.   if there were to be kept as a reference, a screen shot of the results are normally taken and filed away.

Support says this is intentional for resolution tracking purposes - but to counter - as I stated in item 2 - most errors are immediately looked at and worked on. So there is no reason to keep errored results. Especially when they are time-stamped dates greater than the expiration values selected.

Having the option to disable schedules within the Designer application would be advantageous for we support staff.  Especially when multiple service restarts or server reboots are required.  When we perform migrations or restores or even upgrades or when conducting server maintenance actions.   As we know starting of the Alteryx service immediately queues up workflows to be run based against there schedule times.   When maintenance is being performed we do not want workflows to run, and/or having to wait for completions or have the user to rerun the workflow.   The option to temporarily disable schedules globally with a click of a button is far better then changing the parameters of the schedule or even deleting it.   To go a step further = an internal mongodb administration command to disable/enable schedules would also be helpful at the database level 

Hey Sever Gurus - 

There might times where it would really nice to have a group of workflows that were logically related that you wanted to run without having to invoke a 'run now' for each workflow individually.  Sure, you could technically get there with the Runner macro, but in my case, there are intermittent scenarios in which I'd like to be able to run a set of related workflows to kick the tires, but they run at different schedule frequencies during normal operations.  As it stands now, I have to go hunt through 39239 different workflows, find the 12 associated with project X and tell it to blast away individually.  This brings me a great sadness.  

So what I'd like to be able to have is some flavor of named / logical grouping I could attach to a workflow at upload to scheduling time, I could then tell the scheduler to show me / run everything attached to that grouping.  

Thanks!

brian

Hey Alteryx,

I'm liking the new ability to change the permission for users to schedule, prioritize and assign their work.

I would also like the Permissions to not show if I've turned it off. For most users this feature will not be available and showing a feature they won't be able to use will cause more problems then answers.

Just like in the notification tab, I would like the features that are off not show up in the end users profile tab

It would also be nice if we could assign this to a workflow and not just a person. A more likely scenario is that an App that needs a user input shouldn't be scheduled since it won't work. 

To have the ability to turn off the scheduling for just that workflow is more likely then to turn off that feature for an entire person.

Thank you

When opening a canvas - it is possible to open from the gallery, which is important in a team environment.

However - as you work on this canvas - if you hit save, it does not save a new version to the server and increment the original (as would happen on sharepoint) - instead it asks you to create a new file.    

Please can you change this behaviour as follows:

- If I open from the gallery then when I save I'm updating the same Gallery asset and incrementing the version ID by 1.

- The only time I would save in a new file is if I use Save As; and explicitly pick a new file.

 cc: @jalvarezv

There are two key APIs that we use for extracting canvasses for governance & surveillance:

- the Workflows API which lists all canvasses on the server;

-  and the API call which returns a packaged version of the application by AppID

Unfortunately - when we query for all workflows to get the first list - there is no flag to indicate that a subset of these are actually deleted.   The result is that you need to make the second call to find this out which is wasteful.

Please add a "deleted" flag to the Workflows API so that we can identify which applications have been deleted without having to call the specific App ID post.

CC: @jalvarezv

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

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.

Currently only 5 workflows are displayed per page in a collection.  Currently we have about 30 workflows (soon to be about 100) and paging through workflows to find the one you want to run is time consuming.

It would be great if there was an option on the page so the user could select the number of workflows per page.

The Save to Gallery window does not resize. When I try to Save my Workflow to my Gallery and Manage Workflow assets, I can not widen that window to see the full path to my assets.

This makes it very hard when you have many assets to know if they need to be included or not with the promotion. It may take two or three attempts guessing what asset is what to get the correct combination to make my App run correctly.

It would be nice to be able to widen this window much like we can with the Workflow dependencies window.

@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.