Alteryx Server Ideas

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As Alteryx leans more into the Data Science space - it becomes more important to be able to keep rich documentation of the project along with the Alteryx Asset.    This does also require the concept of a "project" on the alteryx server, which would allow for meta-tags; and various different documents to be added with the project.

 

This would include things like Requirement documents; test evidence; test data sets etc.

 

This would extend Alteryx from a data prep engine to more of a data-science workbench as different user groups can participate in a specific project.

Alteryx Server does not presently support any file encryption systems. Many people need to encrypt there Fileshare as a secure measurement and use safeguard lan encrypted. Please provide a solution so workers are able to read and write encrypted files through safeguard lan encrypted.

It should be possible to schedule chained apps. Particularly useful when the first workflow in a chain runs a check and if the check returns true then the next workflows run and if the check returns false then the next workflow should not run. 

 

Possibly related to:
Schedule Configured Analytic Apps - Alteryx Community

It would be helpful to have a central Logging tool for large & complex environments.

 

This would be useful to allow teams to have a central way of logging data transformation errors by error-type; severity; alteryx Canvas; etc.

Right now, there's a message tool, but this doesn't provide a way to create well structured central logging across a team; especially once deployed to a server environment.

 

CC: @rijuthav @jithinmony @HengHe @RajK @ydmuley @revathi @Deeksha @MPistone @Ari_Fuller @Arianna_Fuller @JoshKushner @samnelson @avinashbonu @Sunder_Sriram @Rahul_Thakur @Rahul_Singh

Hello Alteryx Developers,

 

It would be great if you develop a way to connect the Alteryx Designer to AWS Redshift by SSO. When i try to set this type of connection at the Simba ODBC Driver it opens the connection several times with AWS at the browser and that ruin the customer experience.

 

Best Regards

 

Danilo Benjamin

Today, if I want to save a job onto the Alteryx Gallery, I need full permissions to do so and it is a manual process.  For some organizations, this level of access is deemed excessive, which can make properly leveraging the Alteryx Gallery difficult.  Having the ability to write a "deployment" script that could publish a workflow to the Gallery, and potentially add a new workflow to a Collection would be incredibly helpful in these cases.

Allow to create custom user security groups server .

Sales
User1
User2
Studio1


Supply chain
User3
User 4
Studio3
Studio1
......

User setting possible for:

1. Sorting of content to be saved: Cohoseing wether to sort by name, date, type or all

2. number of entries displayed to be saved, 10 is not a good default

3. 1.+2. should be valid for all content like: Workspace, Collection overview, Collection content etc.

 

When posting an app to the Gallery, if the app has, say, one PCXML output for the user to see, and one Excel file for the user to download, it would be helpful for to be able to specify which shows first to the user.  For example, I have a PCXML that gives the user summary tables, and instructions on how to go to the drop down above and select the second report, click on the Excel icon, and download it.  But if the Excel report shows up first, then there is no ability to give them instructions and many simply won't be savy enough to go find the PCXML in the drop down.

Alteryx Designer is an amazing data tool but it’s partner, "the Scheduler" needs some much needed upgrades. The Scheduler interface that pops up from Alteryx Designer does need a complete make over. I’m not going to address this but rather focus on the functionality that if delivered makes the Scheduler much more useful. 

 

Today I’m reading our Mongo db scheduler data using an Alteryx workflow and Tableau to show what’s happening on the Scheduler. This dashboard is what we refer to frequently to see the health of our companies data pipeline.  I’ll share both files soon. 

 

Here are the top 5 features for the Scheduler.

 

  1. Workflow priority ranking. When two or more workflows are scheduled to run at the same time, ‘priority’ sets the order of execution. Priority is set at the time of scheduling the workflow. Values range from 1 to 100. If a priority is not set the default is 50. The ‘priority’ field can be read from Mongo db. 

 

Why: At midnight we set off several workflows. We want to centrally manage which runs first based on a common ‘priority’ field. 

 

  1. Restrict which controller and workers a specific workflow can run on. Default is to run on all servers. At the time of scheduling a workflow can designated to restrict which server to execute on. This creates a field called ‘restrict’ which server it cannot execute on. 

 

Why: Some workflows only run on the main controller due to file system references. Also a worker can be tuned for CPU or Disk I/O and workflows that can benefit from this tuning.  Selecting a disk I/O intensive workflow to run on a server tuned for Disk I/O would speed up our workflows. 

 

  1. Set sequence of successfully completed workflows. 

FYI: We used the Runner tool for a short time to resolve this issue but learned quickly that the Runner tool is like a bull in a china shop and brought our server down. The runner tool as it is today is not an option for production work.

 

Why: This would allow you to run several workflows one after another. For example the first would read from a data source, the second would do calculations on the data and the third workflow would publish the data. All workflows are given a ‘workflow-number’ which can be seen in the scheduler list and read from Mongo db. 

 

  1. If a workflow fails you can set the number of attempts to run successfully. Report attempts greater than 1 in a new field called ‘attempts’ that can be read from the Mongo db. 

 

Why: Some workflows fail and if attempted to run again may work. This includes issues with locked files and workflows dependent on processes outside of Alteryx. 

 

  1. If a workflow runs more than X minutes the scheduler kills the workflow and reports a workflow error with a unique code called ‘execution-limit’.  This code can be read in the mongo db. The defaut is 90 minutes and can be set to any number of minutes. Each workflow can have it’s own limit. 

 

Why: Some workflows start to hog resources and need to be killed. If a new workflow is added this is a good way to protect the overall scheduled workflows. 

Big time user of the Gallery API. In fact, I wrote an R package for it (shameless plug: https://cran.r-project.org/package=alterryx).

 

It is great that you can queue a job for an application using the Gallery API but it would be great if I could also cancel a running job.

Hello,

 

We recently upgraded our on-prem instance of Alteryx Server/Gallery to version: -

 

  • Client: 2020.1.0
  • Server: 2021.3.3.63061
  • Server Binaries: 2021.3.3.63061
  • Service Layer
  • Master: 2021.3.3.63061

 

We have noticed that the search functionality in various areas (top and right-side) no longer return results using a "contains" but rather it is doing an "exact" or "starts with" keyword search. This is very frustrating to many users as we can't easily find our workflows quickly compared to previous versions.

 

Please improve search functionality.

I have tables that I need to run ETL jobs on every 5 mins. But, a batch job runs every day for an hour at the same hour. During that time I can't query the source.
With the current scheduler setup; it appears that my only option would be set up multiple schedules. Each running once a day, and a separate schedule for every 5 minute increment of the day with the exception of the one hour my source can't be touched.
Rather than that degree of hassle, doesn't it make more sense to set up a scheduled with and/or/not criteria?
Example:
Run every X minutes on Y days
Except: during %t am - %t am on Z days

I've seen some applications that have a visual scheduler for setting the exception times. That would be pretty cool too.
Bonus points if you can make an admin console for the server which allows the admin to set blackout date/time by table or DSN for all users (override their schedules).

I would like to collaborate with my team, but also maintain my own personal private studio.

 

Is that on the road map?

 

-Dan

 

 

In order to migrate workflows from our UAT environment to a Production server environment, we are looking for an API capability to work with the server:

- Query canvasses by name or ID (to get a list of canvasses)

- Extract Canvas to a particular location (by ID)

- Upload canvas including dependancies (with parameters for team; collection; etc)

 

This would assist with automating the UAT to Prod process until Alteryx Promote can step into this gap.

CC: @rijuthav @jithinmony @HengHe @RajK @ydmuley @revathi @Deeksha @MPistone @Ari_Fuller @Arianna_Fuller @JoshKushner @samnelson @avinashbonu @Sunder_Sriram @Rahul_Thakur @Rahul_Singh 

Hi everyone,

 

Since the Home page has been replaced by the My Workspace page as the main page on the Gallery, end-users are getting confused or at least uncomfortable with this transition.

 

It would be amazing to change the default main page to the Public tab or even remove/deactivate the My Files tab for these users. 

 

Removing /deactivating the My Files tab will also correct an issue generated when an Artisan is downgraded to an end-user. Currently, these users can see their workflows in the My Files tab but can't access them.

 

fmvizcaino_0-1657748816370.png

 

Idea based on @phottovy 's question: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Discussions/Change-quot-Public-quot-to-default-view-...

 

If a job fails it would be perfect if we could set something in the workflow settings so that the job would retry again in X number of minutes for the next Y number of times. We have jobs that connect to external resources and sometimes the network will reset and will cause the connections to all drop. An example would be I want a workflow to try again in 10 minutes for a maximum of 5 times so over the next 50 mins it will retry every 10 mins if it fails

It would be nice to have an inbuilt function(s) that return an identifier (NTLogin for instance when the gallery is setup with windows auth) of the user running the app on the gallery.

Functions like - USERNAME(), DOMAINNAME() etc., helps.

 

I know that it can be achieved via the "__cloud:UserId" call , which is not officially supported by alteryx. It adds value if it is inbuilt within the product itself.

 

Regards,

Sandeep.

Our company has workflows where we use the Gallery API to kick off executions on server.  The user kicking off the workflow has setup API access using his account, but when he kicks off his jobs, it does not show up under his Gallery so he is unable to view the results.  In the admin panel, it shows the owner as (None) so it does not appear that workflows kicked off via the API get assigned to the user tied to the API key.

 

Conversations with Alteryx support revealed that these results are available via an API call, but not within the Gallery web UI.  It would be great if the user tied to the API key were added to the workflow execution so they could see results within the Gallery rather than going back through the API.  

 

api_execution.png

Option to Zip All Outputs

For workflows that produce various different output files, I think it would be nice if the Gallery had the functionality to create a single zip file containing all outputs. The user would opt in or out of this functionality using a checkbox in the Gallery workflow settings (for apps, this checkbox could also appear as an additional setting above "Questions"). After the workflow has been run, the user would only see the zip file in the output preview instead of each individual output file. 

 

This functionality would create a more user-friendly experience as it would eliminate the need for zip file creation workarounds, such as using the Run Command Tool or the "zipfile" Python library to create zip files (these options also do not generate a zip file in the Gallery output preview).