Alteryx Server Ideas

Hi everyone,

Since the Home page has been replaced by the My Workspace page as the main page on the Gallery, end-users are getting confused or at least uncomfortable with this transition.

It would be amazing to change the default main page to the Public tab or even remove/deactivate the My Files tab for these users. 

Removing /deactivating the My Files tab will also correct an issue generated when an Artisan is downgraded to an end-user. Currently, these users can see their workflows in the My Files tab but can't access them.

Idea based on @phottovy 's question: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Discussions/Change-quot-Public-quot-to-default-view-...

Use Cases:

1. As a server admin, planned PM outages should be scheduled.  These outages should prevent jobs from beginning execution (window of time) prior to the outage.  Jobs running at the time of the cut-off should be system-cancelled.  
2. As a server admin, unplanned outages should cause running jobs to stop.  At the conclusion of an outage, jobs that are system cancelled should be restarted.

Currently, we use Task Manager to control Alteryx Service (or command line).  An administrative function within Alteryx should support graceful stopping and starting of the service as user jobs are interrupted (or can be) by our activities.  While I currently post messages to users alerting them to admin activities, I am asked why Tableau can restart jobs (admin) and we can't.  Other admins have asked what is "hanging" alteryx service up for a STOP command.  I have explained that all jobs must be stopped in order for a quick restart of the service.  

We're using a single server today (this client) and plan to add workers to the configuration.   It would be helpful to know where work is running and be able to use admin functions across the servers.

Cheers,

Mark

We use the Server API to manage our server environment - and we recently noticed that the Workflows API (/admin/v1/workflows) ignores any canvasses after the 10 000'th submission.

For example:

• If we don't use any offsets or limits - then we get 10 000 applications
• If we use an offset of 5000 with a limit of 10000 - we get 5000 applications (i.e. anything after canvas 10 000 is being ignored)
• if we use an offset of 9990 with a limit of 100 - we get 10 rows returned (i.e. anything after canvas 10 000 being ignored)

By querying Mongo directly (appinfos collection) we know that we have 18 800 or so unique applications in our environment.

Please can you remove this cap from the API so that it can be used to query any number of canvasses on a larger environment?

cc: 

+  @Hemanth @marydest24 @Shreyasi @Sotoll @Kosi @revathi @Bethanyturner012  @TanyaS 

Hi,

We have more than 100 workflows scheduled in different intervals for a day. Inorder to monitor this we have to manually check in the workflow results if the workflow ran successfully or not. 

Say a workflow is scheduled every 30mins then we have to check this 48times in a day manually in the Gallery results if it ran successfully or not.

Similarly we will have N number of workflows scheduled with different intervals.

We feel its too time consuming to manually verify this.

It will be good if there is a notification when there is a failure in the run, so we can check it only then rather than checking it every 30mins.

Could the community receive a comprehensive data dictionary of all the collections in Mongo with:

- Description of each collection

- Description of each attribute (or field) within each collection

- Documentation of joins between the collections

A great example can be seen in how Tableau documents their postgresSQL tables: https://help.tableau.com/current/server/en-us/data_dictionary.htm

This would be extremely helpful as we are determining which collections we need to store, how to construct queries and how to build analytics on our assets. 

Thank you!

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.

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.

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.

I've been writing applications and regularly need to REQUIRE fields for data entry.  When I do, I include ERROR MESSAGES at minimum.  Often I label the field as something like:  Name (Required).  Wouldn't it be nice to have a red star or have the data field in another color for background?  Taking this a step further, the validation rules being activated within the screen (rather than during run) would be awesome.

As long as I'm posting ideas, it would be nice to have an Alteryx supported function to identify the user within the application global variables.  For users, it would make my apps more friendly if they could save their configuration (*.yxwv) in the gallery.  Extending that thought, within my application I would like to be able to have easy access to their responses as well.

My use case for access to the .yxwv file data is that I will repeat some of the fields back to the user within my output.  When needed I will write the responses to a text input tool and format it for display in the output.  That requires an additional action and maintenance within the application.

Just a few application thoughts.

Thanks,

Mark

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 

As an enhancement to the gallery, I'd like to be able to save my application parameters in the gallery in a similar fashion to when I run an app locally.  Users can view the results of an application run, but can't save the parameters that created the run.  I'll go a step further than this and ask for another enhancement.  I'd like to be able to access the questions & responses within the execution of the app to display them during reporting.t

Use case:

For a list generation application, I need to present to the user the criteria applied during the selection process.

Input Address: 49015

Type of Vehicle: Chevy

Minimum Year: 2010

Maximum Year: 2015

I've got a working solution that is okay, but not very "Alteryx-easy".  I need to have a second update attached to the interface tool to update the user response.

Thanks for your consideration,

Mark

On the workflow results window, I'd like to see a column for "Start Time". If I have a workflow that is running, I'd like to know what time it started running so I have an idea on when it might finish.

Please support SAML 2.0 for gallery

For scheduled jobs, there should be an option to include performance profiling in output logs globally.  Basically we are looking at how we can understand which custom macros are in use, and in which workflows, and one way to do this would be to get the output logs into another tool (i.e., splunk), and then set up some queries there.  It would work, but I would have to tell N developers to go set performance profiling on, re-upload their workflows, ect.  

But why not have a switch on server / gallery that just turns this feature on globally for every scheduled workflow?  

Thank you for attending my TED talk on why performance profiling should have an option to be set globally. 

The workflow result window shows the Name/workflow, AMP, Priority, Assigned worker, Run as, Completed at, Runlenght, and Runtyp of the workflow. The following feature would also be useful on the page.

1. Showing the creation date of the workflow without taking queue time into consideration
2. The option to change the time zone would make it easier to analyze the logs
3. Detailed insight about the particular workflow results, such as average execution time, failure count, and success count with date filtering. 

It would be nice to have workflow version information on the Workflow Results page for every running status.
The reason for that is after workflow was scheduled and then the published version has been changed, there is no way to follow versions.

Hello!
I found a weird bug in my travels today.

The TL:DR is that when a date input tool within the interface tool is used within a collapsing radio button, it defaults to "dd/mm/yyyy", breaking any app when this is not filled out: 

Both values are default - i have not edited these values. The weirdest part is, this is Server/Private Gallery specific. When this workflow is downloaded and run within Designer:

And the workflow runs fine.

I have not tested this with any of the other interface tools, however I suspect this to not be the only tool this issue resides within.

I have attached the workflow I used (not that it would take long to recreate) for testing.

With Alteryx Server 2019.4, new users cannot create Collections by default. 

As Alteryx Server admin this causes much manual effort on my side, because I need to configure new users manually. 

Alteryx claims to be a tool for automatization and I do not see how this new feature fits into Alteryx's vision.

I wish that there were tools, which allow me to automatize the management of users on the Alteryx Server. 

With a growing number of users on the Alteryx Gallery, manual user management is not an option!

I wish there was a way to create custom roles on the Gallery and assign them to AD groups, similar to "Permissions".

Those custom roles could include the privilege to create Collections, schedule Jobs, etc.

I would also love, if there was a way to give granular access to the Data Connection menu to users. 

I have already addressed this topic to the Alteryx product manager in Q1 2019 and I hope this feature will be implemented in the future. 

It would be really useful to be able to obtain the user name of some one running an app in the Gallery. This could be used for instance in row level security for people running an app that produces a report and that data is considered sensitive