Alteryx Server Ideas

Hello,

Currently, Alteryx server doesn't read multiple files compressed in the zip folder.  Here is more information: How to open multiple xml files using Analytical App workflow saved in Alteryx Server

I think this feature is useful for many people.

Sincerely,

knozawa

Please support GZIP files in input tool in Server. This is related to https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Product-Ideas/Support-for-GZIP-gz-compressed-files-in-input..., but logged in a separate Idea because the staff indicated in the thread that they are planning support for GZIP in Designer only in 2018.2. We need it in Server as well.

When restoring an Alteryx Gallery instance to a second box for test & dev it's highly likely that you don't want all your workflows scheduled from your production instance to run in your secondary instance.

However there doesn't currently seem to be a kill switch that you can implement up front to stop your scheduled workflows from running. The only way to disable scheduled workflows in your test gallery is to manually delete them all, which is annoying when you have hundreds.

It would be great to have a config flag to disable scheduled workflows before the service is started.

I have three team members all in the same private studio. We can see each others' workflows. However, when looking at a workflow that another team member has published to the gallery, it looks like:

1. The workflow has never been run
2. The workflow is not scheduled to run

This is a massive impediment to collaboration because my team handles ETL for most of the company. If a user complains that their data isn't up to date, whoever receives that support ticket needs to be able to see if the workflow is actually running and whether it was successful or had an error during the last run.

Preventing a team from seeing this for each others' workflow schedules and results means that the only person who can deal with an issue is the person who originally made the workflow. Which makes the idea of a shared private studio wholly pointless as we may as well be operating in different universes.

Please create a studio-level setting where all members of a studio can see all schedules and results of all workflows in that studio.

I am running version x of Alteryx locally and my server is running x-2. If I publish a workflow with error reporting via email, the server is not able to recognize that my workflow has error logging because it automatically kicks a version error. The events portion of the XML should be read regardless of the server version and trigger an error when this happens.

A better process Needed for Alteryx Backup and restore.

1. Why do we have to stop the service to do a backup,? We cannot stop a service in Enterprise platform just to do a backup.  we are not able to take backups because our jobs will be running 24X7 We Run jobs on Alteryx Server,
2. All of a Sudden our Windows server crashed and we lost all the data, The backup we have of Mongo DB was not perfectly restored on the new server which breaks the workflow, connections etc  due to encryption....
3. what is the purpose of backup if we cannot restore on a new server in case of DR

Please fix it ASAP,

Hi All,

We are preparing to rollout Alteryx Server in a large organisation and can see that the creation of Collections by many analysts may become problematic over time.

It would be good if we can disable the functionality and only allow for gallery admins to create new collections.

Cheers

Fi

(Commonwealth Bank of Australia)

Alteryx Designer is an amazing data tool but it’s partner, "the Scheduler" needs some much needed upgrades. The Scheduler interface that pops up from Alteryx Designer does need a complete make over. I’m not going to address this but rather focus on the functionality that if delivered makes the Scheduler much more useful. 

Today I’m reading our Mongo db scheduler data using an Alteryx workflow and Tableau to show what’s happening on the Scheduler. This dashboard is what we refer to frequently to see the health of our companies data pipeline.  I’ll share both files soon. 

Here are the top 5 features for the Scheduler.

1. Workflow priority ranking. When two or more workflows are scheduled to run at the same time, ‘priority’ sets the order of execution. Priority is set at the time of scheduling the workflow. Values range from 1 to 100. If a priority is not set the default is 50. The ‘priority’ field can be read from Mongo db. 

Why: At midnight we set off several workflows. We want to centrally manage which runs first based on a common ‘priority’ field. 

2. Restrict which controller and workers a specific workflow can run on. Default is to run on all servers. At the time of scheduling a workflow can designated to restrict which server to execute on. This creates a field called ‘restrict’ which server it cannot execute on. 

Why: Some workflows only run on the main controller due to file system references. Also a worker can be tuned for CPU or Disk I/O and workflows that can benefit from this tuning.  Selecting a disk I/O intensive workflow to run on a server tuned for Disk I/O would speed up our workflows. 

3. Set sequence of successfully completed workflows. 

FYI: We used the Runner tool for a short time to resolve this issue but learned quickly that the Runner tool is like a bull in a china shop and brought our server down. The runner tool as it is today is not an option for production work.

Why: This would allow you to run several workflows one after another. For example the first would read from a data source, the second would do calculations on the data and the third workflow would publish the data. All workflows are given a ‘workflow-number’ which can be seen in the scheduler list and read from Mongo db. 

4. If a workflow fails you can set the number of attempts to run successfully. Report attempts greater than 1 in a new field called ‘attempts’ that can be read from the Mongo db. 

Why: Some workflows fail and if attempted to run again may work. This includes issues with locked files and workflows dependent on processes outside of Alteryx. 

5. If a workflow runs more than X minutes the scheduler kills the workflow and reports a workflow error with a unique code called ‘execution-limit’.  This code can be read in the mongo db. The defaut is 90 minutes and can be set to any number of minutes. Each workflow can have it’s own limit. 

Why: Some workflows start to hog resources and need to be killed. If a new workflow is added this is a good way to protect the overall scheduled workflows. 

From a security standpoint, it is important that all users are authenticated when accesing the Gallery on Alteryx Server and using local accounts.  There shgould be an option available to force user to the login page rather than the public Gallery.  Users going to the Alteryx server URL should be presented with the login page by default before being taken to the Gallery, rather than seeing the public Gallery and needing to click Sign-in in the upper right corner.

There should be a way to set limits on Gallery so users are not able to set up to many scheduled apps to run. Currently you can either allow all users to add as many scheduled jobs to the run or none at all. If one user sets up whatever number to run, keeps other users from running their jobs. Either allow Admins to set limits or have server shift jobs around so one user cannot lock a gallery to only run his/her jobs. A combination of both a set limit per user and better job management by gallery should also solve the problem.

Hi,

We have more clients that would like to prioritize their scheduled jobs based on run time and importance. 

It could be a simple priority number, that decides which job that need to run next. Further it could be nice to be able to allocate certain workers to certain jobs. 

I am looking forward to your feedback.

Daniel

1. view by list instead of icon, can display more items per page 
2. add sorting , like sort by created date, alphabetical order
3. improve the filtering , since there is a bug. The pagination result is wrongly displayed

I am the only Curator and my name is on the 2nd page by default when no filter applied.

When the filter applied, page one showed "There are no users that fit the search criteria" , but my name is showed on the 2nd page.

I would like to request a way to manage API connections. This would mean that API connection strings can be administered in the gallery the way data connections can be created, saved and assigned in gallery. This would help in large organizations, to administer API's within specific groups. This will also help the usage report

It is more convenience that allowing gallery admin to download any workflow from the gallery for trobleshooting.

For example, if the workflow is long running , the gallery admin can download the workflow and then drill down to it to find out the root cause. Sometimes, it maybe workflow design related issue.

I have been trying to scan all of the workflows that are stored in the gallery and wrote this community post about it. Some Alteryx employees reached out to me directly to see if they could help solve my problem. We ended up with a somewhat wonky roundabout solution (that I haven't implemented yet) by downloading yxzp files through the Gallery API, unzipping them, then scanning the workflows as xml. I think the process could be greatly simplified if Alteryx had a set of Introspective tools.

The introspective tools would use similar, if not the same, processes that Alteryx already has in place to pull data from the gallery/server itself. The set of tools would be most useful for Server admins or people that are trying to build meta-workflows for Alteryx to make things easier for their users. Similar to the solution to my problem above, most of this functionality can be worked around by querying the Mongo and/or scanning engine logs. The Introspective tools would simplify this process greatly, especially when it comes to joining records from the Mongo and collecting workflow-internal data.

Since the tools will have direct access to the gallery/server it would make sense that they would only be available to machines with server licensing or could be made available if the user has a high enough permission level in the gallery they are trying to obtain data from.

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

Wondering if there are any plans to change the RC4 encryption on alteryx server to something stronger (eg: AES, Blowfish etc)

Would be curious to see if anyone else in financial services has this challenge from a security perspective.

Adrian

One of the issues that we have with Alteryx jobs in prod (and also Tableau, coincidentally) is that often a canvas is built to serve a need at the time, but after a while it's no-longer needed but it continues to run and consume server resources.

Can we add the option to our server environment to request recertification that a particular job is still needed every X months.

This will achieve 2 useful purposes:

- if the job is no-longer needed then the user hits "No thank you" and it's then taken off the scheduler which reduces server loads

- Alternatively - the user may realize that this should have been handed over to a new team or owner, and they can then make this change based on the recertification prompt.

I'm pretty certain that this would help to manage the inevitable build-up that happens on server environments where jobs build up until the server starts thrashing and the admin team then need to go out to all the users to do this recert process manually.

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