Alteryx Server Ideas

The ability to select a workflow or app within the Gallery web interface and change its name. This would maintain its historical run data, version control revisions, placement in collections, etc. 

Use case: As a workflow or app continues to be developed over time, the name may need a revision to continue reflecting the workflow's function. 

Best regards,

Ryan

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. 

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.

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. 

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?

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! 

It would be nice if the Gallery Admin could download the workflow from the workflow page within the UI, without having to run API calls or having to add himself temporarily to someone else's studio. 

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

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.

Sometimes, a workflow posted to the Server is calling from a source data that has dimensions which are specific to certain users based on departments, divisions, countries, regions, states, or etc. depending on the level of granularity. 

Although Alteryx developers can create Analytical Apps that have the option for end users to select these dimensions, a more seamless experience for end users (and better for security as well) is to have the ability to configure such filters for existing users on the Alteryx Server itself.

So, if Person A belongs to State 1 and Person B belongs to State 2, by default when both Person A & B enter the Server to that specific workflow in a collection or district, they will automatically be filtered for State 1 and 2 respectively. 

This is similar to Section Access configuration - whereby users have already been pre-filtered the moment they enter.

The current workaround is to create multiple workflows and store them in different collections or districts specific to end users, and to make any changes will require a change to the workflow itself. 

It will be great to have a dashboard that allows for Alteryx Server admins to configure on their own without hassle.

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.

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. 

Hello!

Currently one of the pain points when looking at integrating Alteryx Server into an organisation, is the role of a Curator, and who should be given that role. Of course, from an IT perspective, they want governance and control over data connections, users, and configuration - as it is important that users aren't simply able to change the default role to Curator and give all users access to the Administration portal, for instance. On the other hand, a Super User is typically given Curator access to allow for adjustments to all other sections of the Administrator Portal, that IT quite frankly don't care about.

What would be useful, is for a new role to be created, elevated from Curator. Let's call them 'Super Curator'. These 'Super Curators' (or, User-Curators, for a less exciting name) have access to all of the Admin portal as usual. 'Curators', would now only have access to the following (Highlighted yellow for Curator access):

This would aid the conversation from an IT perspective, allowing them to take control of user, data connection, and credential administration, whilst leaving the rest of the control to the other Curators. As this wouldn't always be a requirement, it would be useful to allow for a toggle of this setting within the Configuration on the Gallery. This would also not effect pre-existing setups of curators, as in the update of implementation, all current Curators should be adapted into 'Super Curators'.

Thanks,
TheOC

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.

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

Currently, to allow a user to schedule jobs, prioritize jobs, assign jobs, create collections, or have API access, toggles must be set at the user level.  

As a server administrator, I want to configure these toggles at the group level, so that a) I don't have to modify a large number of users individually to grant them such permissions, b) I ensure consistency across groups of users that doesn't rely on humans clicking all the right things for each of the relevant people, and c) I can easily change these settings for multiple people, if needed.

Hi Server users,

It is amazing to know the permissions we have when accessing our own profile, but sometimes that is not enough. Knowing your server role is needed to perform a few tasks and it would be fantastic to have something simple like the example below.

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/