Alteryx Server Ideas

In the View Schedules screen, currently one must select the Controller at the beginning of each session before being able to see any workflows, schedules, queue or results. This is especially annoying when a company only has one controller and yet must select it each time. However, I would guess that even when an organization has multiple Controllers, each individual user is likely to spend most of their time in one.

It would help both of these situations if the most recently used controller is automatically selected when launching Alteryx Designer.

For a multi tenant Gallery environment it would be great if one could define a dedicated stylesheet / "them" per tenant. Currently, the Gallery allows for only one theme as to be defined in the general admin section of the gallery.

Idea:

Using a few designers and registering to the Alteryx Gallery are good fits for micro and small enterprises, from investment vs capability stantd point.

Alteryx Server is suitable for medium to large enterprises with at least 45K USD budget yearly and many alteryx users possibly more than 20...

Don't you think there is a need for something in between? I propose Alteryx mini-server (well we can find a better name hopefully :)

Rationale:

Many Alteryx clients seem to utilize Alteryx designer for ETL,

then some of them further enrich data and model forecasting or predictive modelling.

Before even considering a server they output to a BI server like

• Qlik server or
• Tabelau server or
• PowerBI

If there is a need for automation Alteryx designer + Scheduler does all the trick needed.

Once you update everything in a repetitive fachion 100s to 1000s of Qlik or Tableau users can reach to the most uptodate content and discover dashboards...

I believe we can do a similar thing with a mini server...

What to do:

When posting an app to the Gallery, if the app has, say, one PCXML output for the user to see, and one Excel file for the user to download, it would be helpful for to be able to specify which shows first to the user.  For example, I have a PCXML that gives the user summary tables, and instructions on how to go to the drop down above and select the second report, click on the Excel icon, and download it.  But if the Excel report shows up first, then there is no ability to give them instructions and many simply won't be savy enough to go find the PCXML in the drop down.

Currently the Private Gallery product has 2 authentication options - AD and built in. 

If an organization uses AD, this solution is fine, however there are many origanizations who use other standard directory systems. One of the more common directory/authentication systemsis LDAP due to its wide adoption and cross platform compatibility. 

It would be fantastic to have functionality similar to the AD integration, however with LDAP for Gallery authentication and user management. 

Best regards,

Ryan

Currently, many of our most useful apps in the gallery utilises blocked tools (download tool, R tool etc). Every deployment or even minor updates to these apps require emailing the Alteryx Curator account for exception requests. This process is quite cumbersome, although the need for it is understandable. However, given that not a single app from us was ever rejected (and we submitted dozens of requests) , it would be great to have a process in place to apply for a permanent whitelisted status. This would give trusted app authors the ability to deploy apps with blocked tools without emailing the Curator. 

We have several workflows that call other workflows (i.e. via the Conditional Runner macro) but are running into some versioning challenges since we moved to storing all of our workflows in our gallery.  When I publish a workflow that references another workflow, I can bundle it up with the workflow when I save it, but then Alteryx places that workflow into the /externals directory, which is obvioulsy not the same as the workflow that we've saved to our gallery.  An example:

I have two workflows in our gallery...one that generates a TDE and one that calls that one if certain file availability and time conditions are met.  The "master" version of each is in the gallery, which is what we want...

...but when I load or save the Sales Analytics workflow in Designer, I have to bundle the TDE workflow with the main workflow in order for it to run from Gallery.  But now I've created a disconnected version of the TDE workflow and if I forget to update it when I update the version in the Gallery, I'll be running the wrong version.  I know I could store these workflows in a network directory, but that seems to defeat the purpose of the Gallery.

If I'm not missing something insanely obvious, I think this would be a very important feature enhancement, namely the ability to pull in a Gallery workflow into another workflow.

I would like to see the ability to post comments under workflow information to help with development and elicit feedback. Currently if there is a problem with the macro/workflow you must contact the owner of the workflow directly. It would be nice to leave the creator of the workflow a constructive comment, operating question or a thank you comment. Especially in the Public Gallery where the development time of new version could be reduced for both private individuals looking to share and macros developed by Alteryx that eventually turn into standard tools.

The idea here is that it would be very beneficial to allow general users to publish .YXZP packages to their server gallery (and/or the pubic gallery!!!).  Currently, this can only be accomplished by a server administrator through the 'Admin' page on the server.  It is also a completely different process than that of publishing Apps, Workflows, Macros etc., which can be done easily from the desktop designer.

For instance,  I have developed an Adobe Analytics - Connector Toolkit, which is a .yxzp package, and is located HERE (check it out!).  However, I do not have the ability to upload it to gallery.alteryx.com because I am obviously not an admin on the public gallery.

The neat thing about publishing packages to the server is that they appear just like Applications in the gallery.  Descriptions can be added and you can even disable the default 'Run' button and provide a 'Download' or 'Save' button instead.

Hopefully, this is a feature that may be available in a future server release!

Regards.

Taylor Cox

P.S. - the Adobe Analytics - Connector Toolkit is also attached below.

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).

As a server administrator, I would like to have more control over collections.  I have a user who is in charge of a collection out of office, and we have some users who need to get to be added to the collection to run workflows.  As admin of the server, I would like to be able to add users to this collection, modify permissions, modify workflows, etc.  This would be necessary both for when users are temporarily out of the office as well as if someone were to leave the company.

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.

The idea is that we could grab a workflow that had been placed in the scheduler db and then if the workflow is lost as a file then it could be reclaimed from the scheduler db

I would like to collaborate with my team, but also maintain my own personal private studio.

Is that on the road map?

-Dan

Currently any workflows/apps published to the gallery can be found via the search function - even when the particular user has no permission to this workflow/app. While this only allows for the non-permisssioned user to see the title, this could still leak information as it allows anyone to find apps published in someone's private gallery.

Both the Alteryx Public Gallery and the Private Gallery product are impacted by this. Additionally this is not just limited to logged in users, but also public viewers of the gallery.

My proposed idea:

1. Force the search function to be permission aware, and only show a user workflows they have permission to see/execute.
2. Allow for option 1 to be enabled/disabled if there are use cases where anyone should be able to search and find any app/workflow on the server.

Best regards,

Ryan

Rather than schedule to put things on the 5th day or the 14th day of a month, we often want to schedule our flows to run on the 5th business day or the 14th business day. I know that the term 'business day' means different things in different parts of the world, but I think it would be a feature that many reporting-oriented departments would enjoy. Let people specify a formula or have a table to go off of for their definition of 'business day' and it should be easy to implement.

I would add a <scheduler> label to this but there isn't one.

I wish Alteryx had an Alteryx gallery not only for workflows but for pure data sources as well which we can access with;

• freemium license for certain aspects
• a specific monthly fee or
• a prepaid model...

And I would like to be able to get weather data as a starter;

• historical temperature data is one thing and can be found over the internet so this part may be the freemium one...

But especially the most needed aspects are;

• cloud cover
• relative humidity
• average precipitation rate
• barometric pressure
• wind chill temperature
• wind direction in degrees
• wind gust speed

Obviously 5 day 3 hour forecasts for all these aspects are another thing and probably this will generate some revenue...

This information is so essential in order to accurately forecast

• credit risk in agricultural lending to
• planning electricity loads and pricing...

Mathematica (since version 7) and wolfram has this built in already!

https://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/newin7/content/CurrentAndHistoricalWeatherData/

http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/symbol.html?symbol=WeatherData

This is the source of data; http://reference.wolfram.com/language/note/WeatherDataSourceInformation.html

Totally agree that maintaining a data source covering worldwide is not an easy task but I think will help Alteryx users and customers a lot...

When you want to re-run a chained app in Alteryx Server, give the option to run the first, second, etc app. Right now it only reruns the last app.

Hi

My idea is to facilitate scheduling through Gallery vs the separate scheduler built into Designer. The reasons for this:

1. The current scheduler authentication with Alteryx server via token is a big security concern. This allows all users to see all schedules, workflows, output logs, etc. for the entire server.  
2. It will better interact with the Alteryx 10 version contol. Current scheduler shows all prior versions in the workflow list.
3. Allow the server/gallery admin to setup scheduling rules. Ex: No scheduling during certain windows (for maintance downtimes), max frequency of scheduling, prevent users from scheduling too many jobs at the same time, user level rules.
4. Allow scheduled workflow output to be retrieved from the "Workflow Results" section by the user who scheduled the workflow. Ex: I schedule a workflow that takes 2 hours to run at 6AM each day, then by the time I arrive at the office at 8AM, I can login to the gallery and download the output. 

Thanks,

Ryan