Alteryx Server Ideas

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.

When rerunning a failed manual job, the same Priority is used, but the Optional Job Name is not and cannot be re-entered on submit.  User has to go to Workflow results page and Edit to add the Optional Job Name for a rerun.

I suggest the Optional Job Name text box be added to the rerun submit page.

Prefill using the original job's value if one exists.

Thanks,

MJ

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. 

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 we look at upgrading Alteryx Server - one of the challenges is that it's an all-or-nothing approach; and there doesn't seem to be a guided wizard approach to upgrading.

The upgrade process would be much less intimidating if we could create a Migration tool which can work across versions - similar to Microsoft SQL Server which has the.    This would allow us to:
- Migrate a subset of assets up or down versions

- Migrate across servers to do consolidation or to split loads into different servers for the purpose of segregation

- Progressively migrate over time to limit the risk.

cc: @JohnPelletier 

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.

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

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. 

Hello, Alteryx users,

My idea is simple but would make things way easier for the analytical app users on the Gallery.

Currently, the order is ascending and we can see all the files from all the applications we have run before.

It would help a million to see the most recent files first and only see the files related to this workflow.

Thank you,

Fernando Vizcaino

Please support SAML 2.0 for gallery

Hello,

We use external corporate scheduler and we would like to start scheduling Alteryx workflows in this way. However, collections don't have API which would simplify our way of running workflows which we are shared by the users. Are you planning to enable such feature?

Best,

Piotr Zawistowski

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

Some of our artisans are unable to publish straight from designer and it would be great if there was an "Upload workflow" button in the private studio just like there is for curators in the admin panel.

It would be useful there was the concept of a description for Alteryx content, which was displayed within Gallery, as even with logical folders, naming conventions & tags when there are several hundred items available this additional metadata would be highly beneficial to users to know what the content they can see actually does. The ability to search this description would also be highly useful.

Although the connectivity to the eMail infrastructure is set up on the controller and worker nodes - there is no ability to set up automated alerting for errors on workflows from the server.

We would like to be able to set up the gallery as follows:

- Every job is owned by a user or a distribution list

- If that workflow throws an error or warning (this should be configurable on the server, whether warnings are included), then the author should be e-mailed with a link to the specific workflow and the error log.

This can be done in a round-about way, by running an error-reporting alteryx job after the fact - but this kind of alert needs to go out almost immediately given our dependance on Alteryx for specific SLAs.

cc: @avinashbonu ; @Deeksha ; @revathi

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.

Currently the Gallery's Admin API is a bit light on functionality. It only works with data connections & workflows and not regular server admin functions. Endpoints I'd love to see, but not limited to, are:

• Create/modify/diable users
• Create/modify/delete subscriptions (including assigning users to subscriptions)
• Job status
• Add/modify/delete workflow schedules

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

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