Alteryx Server Ideas

As an Alteryx Admin, we have too many users to maintain the Data Connections for every connection that every user has. A nice add to the collections ability is to create and share Data Connections among users of only that Collection. Managed by the Collection Admin(s), they would be able to manage their own credentials and connection strings for their team and project.

Currently, only Gallery administrators can create credentials on the Gallery.  But this doesn't seem to make sense because publishing users may need to embed their credentials in workflows.  And they would benefit from managing these on server so that password changes don't require re-publishing large numbers of workflows.   Please allow any user to create and manage credentials on the Gallery.  

I’m facing issues with scheduling workflow in Europe/London timing. I’m trying to schedule jobs to run at 10pm UK hours everyday (except Fri and Sat) starting from today i.e. 26th Jan (as per UK timing)
However since I’m in India and my local desktop is showing India time (which is 00:15hrs on 27th Jan), the Alteryx Gallery scheduler is picking India hours but not as per the region we selected. The 26th Jan date is greyed out and unable to select.
The workaround for this to change local time on desktop which is not in our control in our case.
Could you please bring a change in this behavior. If I am am scheduling on x date a workflow for a timezone which is x-1 the scheduler should allow me to set up the schedule.

I am an Artisan but not the Owner of the studio - I uploaded the workflow and would like to see all the jobs (including manually triggered) that run for my workflow so I can track any issues i.e. when workflow fails. I checked with the Owner of the studio and he also can see only the runs he triggered. 

I understand from the Support team in my company that option to see all the jobs that run is currently available only for the Curator role but would be extremely helpful if you would make it available to all the users that have access to the Private Studio.

When I publish a workflow, I want it to have different behaviour based on the collection from which it was executed or scheduled. Let us suppose that I create a DEV collection and a PROD collection. The workflow is shared in both. If the workflow is executed from DEV, then I will have some logic to do X (output to specific folders, etc). If from PROD, the logic will do Y. The logic will be up to me. If the collection information is captured in the MongoDB layer, then I can pull it out on the fly by joining the collections, appInfos, and AS_Queue or AS_schedules collections. Querying the DB on the fly during execution and pulling that value is trivial. Once I have it, I can use it for any sort of logic as an environment sensing variable. Can you please store the info in MongoDB?

Is there a way to check the version of the CASS data packs or other data packs on a server without logging into the server? It would be nice to have the option to check current data packs from the gallery within your profile. Today we can check the Client and Server version when logged in as a user. 

Thank you,

Berger

When we download from the gallery, please return both the altered gallery code and the original unaltered code so user can choose the base to build next version on.

Most everyone learns the hard way that saving to the gallery alters their code in ways that it may no longer work as it did before when running on desktop. After figuring out what has happened and laboriously un-doing the alterations that happen when saving to the gallery, we develop schemes to keep separate desktop versions of gallery apps in sync. These schemes should not be necessary. 

It would be a nice feature for users on the 'keys' tab in gallery to provide code examples in python (maybe pre-configured in python tool) or javascript (maybe pre-configured in js tool) or even offer download of @patrick_digan 's API macro with the key/secret already placed in the macro with the end game being able to not have users stumble through building a block of code that they know or don't know should work! 

I would like to see ability to limit the number of versions a user can save of a workflow. As a server environment ages we start to see the database become unnecessarily larger because the number of version of workflows. For servers related to DEV and QA environments as an Admin I would like to be able to say users can keep their 10-25 most recent versions of their workflows. Then anything over that will start to auto-delete just like the auto save feature in Designer. 

Alteryx saves log files in UTF-16 please change the format to UTF-8 as the logs can be streamed using applications like New Relic to track the performance as they only support UTF-8 format.

Sorry if this idea has already been addressed, but I would love an enhancement that would allow users to upload multiple files to the Gallery to be processed and ran by a published app. 

Currently, the only way to accomplish this is by adding multiple File Browse tools to the published app. But if you have a workflow that needs to upload more than a couple files, this becomes a problem. 

Similar to other code/software repository, it would be nice to have the ability to add a message to the reason why a workflow is updated/modified for users of a collection with access can easily review and revert back to older versions quickly.

Fix typo in introduction to user guide

As a part of the installation process or Configuration setting for Alteryx Server , can there be an option added to turn on "Subscription API" enabled for ever

It used to be possible to create a robust user profile within the gallery, with many additional user details fields available. However all have been taken away leaving only a name and email address as a user profile.

Please bring back those user details as having additional information about the user always beneficial. If internal to the company, sometimes I need to know what department they are from or what office. And if external to the company, I need to know what organization they are from.

Having no additional user information can cause a lot of confusion, especially if any two users share a name since I don't know if it's the same user with a new email, or a different user completely.

Thanks.

We have configured the service account for Alteryx services on workers, controllers and Gallery. Kindly go through the below problem statement and current scenario and help to provide solution.

I will appreciate if we can setup a 30 minutes call and discuss on it.

Purpose/Current Design :

1. Our purpose was to on board the account in EPV-AIM/gMSA solution so that password won’t be hard-coded anywhere in the config for service LAN account.
2. Use same LAN service account to run the workflow on workers and write the output at destination paths [ Shared paths, Mailboxes]
3.  

Problem Statement  :

As we have added service LAN account  in multiple AD groups [ global and local ] it has become member of 440+ groups which has resulted in the approx.. token size to 8421.

Active directory has a limit of having approx.. token size to 10000 (10k) for LAN accounts and after that it will fail to authenticate with AD ; which will result in failure of starting Alteryx services.

Please refer below link to know what exactly issue we are facing and looking solution from Product team[Alteryx].

https://www.jijitechnologies.com/blogs/active-directory-token-bloat

We are looking from the Alteryx team :

1. Find a solution and provide some enhancement where we can use multiple (more than one) LAN accounts to run the workflows.
2. In Large scale when we are running workflows of different team’s it is obvious that LAN ID will be member of multiple AD groups and it will reach to Token bloat threshold.
3. We are looking something which can be provided as solution within the same setup to add multiple accounts or any other solution .

We already explored the option you suggested [https://help.alteryx.com/current/server/credentials] but as per our firm’s password policy we cannot save/use/withdraw privilege account passwords.

Because if we go with the suggested option we have to add the particular accounts in Windows server privilege group [ Log on as service, App_Security Logon locally and run batch job].

To meet compliant policy ; Any account which is privilege should be considered as app to app account and it should be integrated with Microsoft’s gMSA or CyberArk’s EPV-AIM solution to be on boarded account in vault. [ No human interaction with account ]

Feel free to reach out to me for any additional clarifications.

I know the Alteryx server supports auto-scaling up and out as of now. Alteryx Servers should also support auto-scaling down and in.  

Links included in the notification emails sent to users (e.g. links to collections/workflows in our Private Gallery) or copied from the browser address bar only works for public workflows or for workflows in your private studio.

If the workflow is in a collection shared with you, clicking on the link takes you to what seems to be the gallery page for the workflow asking you to sign in, but after you sign-in you are redirected to the gallery home page and not back to the workflow page.

The same occurs regardless if you're already signed-in or not.

This was related to support case: 00352021

Alteryx server APIs are associated with Subscription ( private or shared studio) and an Artisan could be part a of either a private or shared studio. In an enterprise environment you want the ability of scheduling workflows from private studio ( automation of private workflows) and shared studio ( production automation). You can achieve both in an enterprise environment with governance and control if Artisans ( along with Curators) have the ability to switch subscriptions. This will enable them to publish workflow in their private studio for automating personal workflows and in shared studio for production automation. In this way admin or curator still control the data connection creation and assignment , run as credentials but switching subscriptions can be provided to Artisans as well.

Shared studio's private api key and secret can be setup in other scheduling systems such as Ctrl-M and individual leaving or moving departments will not have any impact  on the scheduling configuration.

At present Gallery API events are captured without User details..

Eg:

if an Admin user changes the "Default permissions" under "Permissions" this will be captured as a galley API event in server Gallery logs..
but it will not capture the user details, who has changed the same..

Looking forward to a feature which can accommodate this..