Alteryx Server Ideas

Today the v3 api requires curator access.  V3 has Getters that should work for users with API permission.  The Getter should return the objects that user has access to.   Example:   GetCredentials for a normal user with API access should return credentials that the user has access to.  Today they get a 401 auth error.

We don't want to make these users curators just to let them access the V3 api.

As a system admin, I need a simple, reliable way to back up the Alteryx Server without shutting it down first. A hot-backup (and restore) utility that includes a consistent copy of MongoDB plus any other server config files would allow me to do this.

Not sure if this has already been suggested but I couldn't find it in the ideas...

It would be awesome if in the Gallery some better documentation could be created for the naming of the different private studios, collections, and districts. The naming causes some confusion because it is so different than most other products which causes confusion in our company.

in the current alteryx gallery if we need to disable of enable the schedules workflows we need to manually enable or disable them.

example if we have 100 scheduled workflow. and we want to disable all of them and then enable them later. currently we spend hours to manually disable and enable each of them.

By adding a feature to select the workflows in scheduled to enable of disable the selected one at one which will save hours of time.

Please keep in mind that this is a suggestion from a container novice! 🙂

However, our situation is such that our release upgrade deployments are taking significant time to install, test and sign-off from DEV through PROD for the four main life-cycles involved in our server environment. Even if we script the deployment to save time, there's still manual configuration needed to confirm the new version works in the next server environment.

Similar to how Promote can deploy from DEV through PROD using images/containers, my suggestion is to package the Server components into images/containers that can be similarly deployed through the life-cycles. While the container with mongoDB doesn't need to move to the next life-cycle, the containers with the web server, load balancer, and engine nodes could move with the click of a button. And if needed, reverted to prior version with similar ease.

I forgot to ask about this idea at the UX lab during Inspire, but would be very happy to hear if it's already in the pipeline!

Thank you for your consideration!

The AlteryxService addtoqueue command is great, but it leaves me wanting more.  My simple use case is to run WorkflowB via the addtoqueue command in an after run event from WorkflowA, which is run daily.  The result is that i end up with a cluttered scheduler with many instances of WorkflowB that i need to manually clean up, since addtoqueue creates a new record in AS_Applications each time it runs

It would be useful if there was an AlteryxService command for each of the subroutines already built in to the scheduler front end app: schedule workflow, update workflow, add workflow, remove workflow, edit schedule, etc

MongoDB objects could be identified by oid which the user can get from querying the AlteryxService database

I don't want to rebuild what you've already built, just need a little more control over it 🙂

Hi,

Currently for most of our workflows we are using our private Alteryx Server to run workflows, using executables that call alteryxenginecmd and output logs to dynamically created log files.  However, there is currently no way to leverage a custom log location for a workflow that is run directly from the Alteryx Gallery (apart from sending an email, which has scalability problems).

I would like an option to create the output log as part of a workflow, so that when we save that workflow to the Gallery, it can output a log with a dynamic name easily.

Currently , once a user have SetPriority access ,he can select from Low, Medium, High or Critical priority levels to ensure certain jobs always take priority over others.  

This feature can be misused as users can upgrade their priority levels to jump up the queue and later downgrade the levels. It's difficult to justify and ask each others when you have 1000+ jobs running in a day and it makes administration tough and gives unbiased Gallery to all end users.

It would be nice to have on Admin console, global option to set max priority level so that no user can jump up level beyond this.

This is a real flaw in the product (almost a bug), you cannot search for a schedule.  We have about 150 jobs scheduled to run daily.  If you want to amend the schedule you have to page next through all the schedules to find it.  If you search for the workflow name, you get the workflow screen which does not contain a link to the schedules.

Also add a link to the schedules for each job on the workflow page.  I.e. search for job ABC, see that it has 3 different schedules associated with it and be able to edit, or delete any of its schedules.

There needs to be a means for Server Admins to delete/clean up subscriptions and users from the system.

Ref: https://help.alteryx.com/server/11.0/admin/index.htm#Administration/Users.htm%3FTocPath%3DAdminister..., “To revoke a user's access to Gallery, deactivate their user account. You cannot delete a Gallery user's account.”

While testing with version 11.0, default permissions set to NO ACCESS, Security using Windows Active Directory, I gave the gallery URL to a random teammate to see what they could access.  While permissions prevented the individual from most activities, the server still created a USER and SUBSCRIPTION for the individual.  Once testing was completed, there was no means possible to clean up these entries., or at least to do more than set them to NO ACCESS.

For most enterprise applications, it is common practice to be able to purge a user account from a system if they are no longer a member of the company.

Our team is still fairly new to the Gallery, so if there's something existing that I'm missing, I'd be glad to hear it.

I recently found the following thread : http://community.alteryx.com/t5/Publishing-Gallery/Get-App-User-name-at-Run-TIme/m-p/775/highlight/t...

Which included a text box input with a title of "_cloud:UserID".  I was able to use this to pull in things such as the users login information, email address, etc.

I would like to be able to use a function similar to this in order to generate user-specific usage reports, or dynamically update a "Send Email" tool with the email of the running user.

However, when I inquired about this "_cloud:UserID" API call, I was told that it is an undocumented and unsupported call.

Ideally, I'd like an application/macro tool that does something similar - which takes the user's credentials automatically from the gallery and runs the Application based on those credentials.  This could modify Emails or filter the output of the Workflow.  I'm sure there are other use cases as well.  I think having an officially supported tool to manage this would allow for a wide variety of dynamic applications on the gallery.

One needs to obtain a designer license in order to have a server license.

It may be a good idea to package those two don't you think, and now it's ok to install designer on a Server OS.

It would be awesome if you automatically have a virtual desktop environment to connect to...when you get a server license,

The following is a slide from Inspire 2016 and the client's are already doing this

1. For keeping the running workflows unaffected by docking undocking workstations

2. It also increases the performance by getting the designer closer to the data

3. It would also be safe to share company analytics capabilities with outsider without giving them direct access to downloadable data etc.

As Alteryx Admin, we want to understand what our users are doing in their workflows as much as possible to ensure best user experience. In order to do this we would like to scan through User workflow XML in order to breakdown everything going on. We understand that their are many posts on workflows already doing a lot of this but:

Our Ask:  is to release XML DTD or similar documentation that can help us breakdown workflows at individual tool levels (as well as differences between tool versions)

This would allow us to further build out solutions to admin visibility of user workflows.

Hi,

 We need a way to figure out at which tool alteryx workflow is currently at (i.e., workflow execution progress log) when the workflow is running on the alteryx server scheduler.

This is very useful especially if you have analytical workflows that take long time to run (say 4-6 hours) and at the moment there is NO WAY to figure out at which stage the execution is at from the scheduler.

We can't open the log file on the server as the workflow is IN PROGRESS (we get the standard The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process) . We can't see the underlying progress log under Scheduler Queue tab either.

It will be useful to capture that information in MongoDB or somewhere so that we can read the In progress log in the real time..

 Thanks,

Sandeep.

It would be nice to be able to toggle between the Admin screens and the Gallery screens.  

In the Private Server settings, you can "Run As", but it is all or nothing -- anything on Scheduler will "Run As" the user coded (or you can leave it as the default which is the machine).  It would be helpful if functionality existed like the Gallery - where you can dictate "Run As" for each individual module.

We have a usecase where we want to check how often a workflow runs via the API so we can automate the consumption reporting we do internally. Right now the API only reads out workflows that were scheduled using said API. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Enabling it to also read out all the other workflows would really make this a powerful feature for us and I suspect others.

Many organizations have IT applications (Splunk, OSIsoft PI, etc.) that can consume, historize, and monitor Windows Performance Monitor items.  If would be great if Alteryx wrote application-specific information to PerfMon.  Things like: number of engines running, number of workflows in the queue, number of people logged into gallery, time it takes for data to pass between DB/Controller/Gallery, etc. This would go a long way in helping admins to properly size systems and monitor them for upsets.

HI,

I could not find any possible way to send an email if the Alteryx workflow is taking more than expected time.

I was wondering if any such feature is available

In my organisation, Alteryx workflow keeps running sometime due to memory issues. It will be great to know about these delay and handle them.

Regards,

Vish