Alteryx Server Ideas

I would like to be able to see which collection(s) a Workflow is in since in future users will access the majority of workflows via a Collection - so if a user asks me about access to a certain workflow I can find out how they would get access to it i.e. which Collection(s) it was available in and who owns those.

I would like to set a retry count when scheduling a job, and also to specify to duration in between retries, e.g. job fails, but then will retry to run 3 times with a 5 minute wait in between each retry.

Also would like a radio button next to all workflow results, so when you get a list of failed jobs you can click all the jobs and then hit rerun.  This should be complimented with select all functionality.  This will prevent me from having to go into each job and rerunning, i.e. save me loadsa clicks! 

See following article for background reference: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Discussions/workflow-exceeded-maximum-runtime-of-30-...

I have a support case (#00278355) advising unsupported changes to the alteryx.config file, involving an undocumented setting for chainedTimeout, as in:

<engine enableAutoLicensing="true" useServiceLayerComposer="true" chainedTimeout="10800"

This setting should be documented, supported, and made user-configurable through the System Settings GUI. 

Hello,

Maybe it's time to have a better licensing model. In addition of the current and restricted core-base model, why not having a user-based model?

Best regards,

Simon

As large enterprises continually strengthen security around their system and data assets, we're seeing adoption of products like CyberArk's Enterprise Password Vault (https://www.cyberark.com/products/privileged-account-security-solution/enterprise-password-vault/ )

The system is essentially a central repository that secures and automatically rotates passwords for privileged accounts- things like a functional account you would use to run workflows against a certain database or set of systems.

It would be great if Alteryx could build both Server (Run As Account) and Designer (for individual database connections) integrations with a tool like that.

Hello,

The Analytics team for our company services 9 different lines of business, and it would be helpful to create sub folders within each line of business. It would be helpful to be able to restrict the access for each individual sub folder also. Our team deals with different teams within each line of business, and they may need to have different access due to sensitive content. 

Thanks,

Erik M

Currently, in order to run an app via the API, you have to have uploaded the app to your private studio. Frankly, I don't find this function useful because you have to download then re-upload an app in order to gain access to the API. The API would be more useful if when an app is shared with you (or a collection is shared with you), then it would also allow for that app to be run via API by the user it was shared with. Right now, the only person who can run the app via API is the user who originally uploaded said app. 

Many people maintain valuable information in Excel files, and many organizations, like ours, also use SharePoint to store and share structured and unstructured information. We see most user-generated and maintained data in Excel files in SharePoint document libraries, and one of the great benefits of Alteryx is the ability to join that Excel data with other data sources.  Unfortunately, the v11.0 Scheduler cannot resolve the UNC-style ( \\server@ssl\DavWWWRoot\site-name\document-library\filename ) addresses, so workflows that access this valuable SharePoint Excel data must be run manually. The SharePoint List Input tool can read the list-style metadata for Document Library files, but does not access the file content.

The Scheduler should be enhanced so that scheduled workflows can read Excel data stored in SharePoint Document Libraries. 

I work at a large organization where Security and Privacy are of utmost importance. The ideology that we need to follow is Least Privilege and Need to Know.

We (Curators) do not want all the Artisans to publish workflows to Home Page, either knowingly or unknowingly. We however do want to allow a few power users to publish their work in Home Page, but currently the Gallery does not provide the ability to pick and choose who can share workflows publicly. We are educating users to not share any contents publicly, but as we scale up, it will be difficult to manage and govern this.

I'm suggesting to implement a global Yes/No feature that will Enable/Disable Artisans to publish contents in Home Page (just like the way we have for Jobs/Scheduling feature). Further, in Users section, Edit User setting needs to have a Yes/No button that will allow Curators to let certain Artisans place workflows in My Company's Gallery.

Organizations that never want any workflow to be shared publicly can disable this feature using global Yes/No button. Organizations (like the one I work at) that want to enable this only for certain Artisans, can set the Global Yes/No to No, and then in Users tab, they can pick and choose the Users that need this functionality (which will override the global default). Finally Organizations that do not really care about this functionality can just set the global setting to Yes.

Hoping other organizations find value in this functionality as well. Thanks.

Currently, Alteryx Server lacks rich job scheduling functionality to other products like Control-M and Informatica's Scheduler

Feature Requests:

1) Ability to configure job retries on failure without having to rerun the workflow based on a  event trigger: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Knowledge-Base/How-to-run-a-workflow-from-an-event...

There are common occurrences where a workflow may fail to connect to Input sources and a retry would normally resolve the issue. 

2) More user friendly way to setup dependencies between scheduled workflows.  For example, if workflow A fails it triggers workflow B to run.  If workflow B runs without errors, it triggers workflow C to run.  Currently, we would need to configure this based upon events.  A complex chain of scheduled workflows becomes difficult to manage and scale.

Hi there,

On the server product you have the ability to set up timeouts to avoid server resources being hogged by any one canvas.

Currently this setting only applies to scheduled canvasses - however this leaves a gap where users can just run this manually.

Please can you extend this setting to also cover manually initiated jobs too?

Hi

In a heavily used server environment, and depending on how workflows are deployed, it is possible to accumulate a vast number of "one off" workflows that could/should be deleted  as they would never be used again. In one of our environments we have over 1 million of these.

Currently we are manually deleting them 500 at a time but have asked if there is a way to script the delete process to make it more efficient. We have been told that to really delete a workflow you would need to touch at least 4 collections.

Can we have a Delete workflow API in one of the next releases in order to address this issue?

Thank you

Tom Diroff

When restoring an Alteryx Gallery instance to a second box for test & dev it's highly likely that you don't want all your workflows scheduled from your production instance to run in your secondary instance.

However there doesn't currently seem to be a kill switch that you can implement up front to stop your scheduled workflows from running. The only way to disable scheduled workflows in your test gallery is to manually delete them all, which is annoying when you have hundreds.

It would be great to have a config flag to disable scheduled workflows before the service is started.

My team currently uses the API to call a large number of workflows via a Python based scheduler process.  We use this currently by having ~10 users in a single subscription (Private Studio).  

All of the Private Studio sites on the Alteryx help state that they are going away in the near future to be replaced by individual studios and Shared Collections.  

From our testing, this would kill our processing as we cannot have an API for 1 Private Studio call workflows from a different private studio even if they have access through a shared collection.  

Are there plans to adjust the API endpoints in the future to better account for this?

Our IT department is looking to move to the Collections based structure now in preparation for the removal of the current Studio setup, so another question is when the structural update is planned to go into effect (which server version should we expect this?) so that we can get ready to account for this or if we can ask them to back off a little.

Thanks

There is a strong need for more APIs to be introduced in Alteryx Server so that our Admin teams can provide automated solutions to our users. My understanding is that a lot of these will be introduced into Alteryx Analytics Hub however, it is also needed in Alteryx Server.

I would propose that the internal APIs for Collections and Scheduler be exposed to the Admin Key/Secrets so that we can use these APIs to move our Users workflows directly to their collection or automatically schedule for them, if needed. It seems that all this would take would be to release the Authorization from internal to the Admin on the API.

APIs I am requesting be released:

• PUT .../gallery/api/collections/{collectionID}/apps/{appID}/
• POST .../gallery/api/scheduler/

Good Day

We need a way to read a workflow log file while the workflow is running .. we want to peek inside the log file to see what is happening in the workflow, especially for the  case when the workflow seems to be "hung". This would be an invaluable troubleshooting tool.

Currently these worklfow log files are locked by Windows and are inaccessible by all but unapproved 3rd part utilities .. if at all.

Often these logs disappear if the workflow needs to be deleted in order to save the environment

It is noted that the service logs do not exhibit this behavior, so the request is to

1) allow the running workflow logs to have the same behavior as the service logs

2) provide a work around to allow reading of the running workflow logs

3) ?????

Thank you for thinking about this

Tom D

Open Custom Group management internal API's for Curators (or those with Admin Secret/Keys)

• GET .../gallery/api/usergroups/   --> Get all Groups
• POST .../gallery/api/usergroups/   --> Add new custom group
• POST .../gallery/api/usergroups/<GroupID>/members/    --> Add a group member
• Get .../gallery/api//usergroups/<GroupID>/ --> Get Group Details

If your server is on SAML, you can't leverage any AD group for granting access to resources. The new custom group feature is a help, but still requires you to manually add groups and member users, so it doesn't scale for large organizations (too much management overhead).

Having the internal APIs exposed would allow me to do my own group sync tool, synching members between Custom and AD groups of the same name. 

As a server Admin, I'd like to be able to do via APIs all that I can do via the Server Admin UI. This other idea was recently accepted for opening the collections APIs for Admin, it would be great if both Collections and Groups management were opened on the same upcoming release.

Along with setting a schedule for an app in the gallery, the user should also be able to set the different interface values for each schedule he/she makes.

My main use case is regarding having generic templates for ETL processes, that have multiple different types of runs based on configuration values, but I'm sure there are plenty others.

Best,

dK

The AlteryxService internal authenticated API that the nodes use to communicate with each other for status is not accessible to customers because it is using an undocumented authentication method. The data this appears to provide would be useful to server administrators to determine the true health of the individual nodes and for reporting purposes.