Community Spring Cleaning week is here! Join your fellow Maveryx in digging through your old posts and marking comments on them as solved. Learn more here!

Alteryx Server Knowledge Base

Definitive answers from Server experts.

How to Send an Automatic Email when Workflow Errors

londonhanson
Alteryx
Alteryx
Created

How to Add an Event to Send an Automatic Email when Workflow Errors


Configure a workflow to send an email when a workflow errors on the server or with Desktop Automation.
 

Prerequisites

 
  • Alteryx Designer
    • All versions
  • Alteryx Server
    • All versions
  • SMTP settings
 

Procedure

 
  1. In the Workflow - Configuration pane, click "Events".
  2. Ensure the checkbox "Enable Events" is checked.
  3. Click "Add" > Send Email
           529277_cropped.png
  1. In the "Run Event When" dropdown, select "After Run with Errors"
  2. Configure SMTP host name for your organization
  3. Configure the port:
  • Port 25, when None is selected via Encryption.
  • Port 465, when SSL/TLS is selected via Encryption.
  • Port 587, when STARTTLS is selected via Encryption.
  1. Select the Encryption: None, SSL/TLS, or START/TLS.
  2. If you want to authenticate the event, check the Authentication box, and provide a valid Username and Password.
  3. Enter the "From" email address; the email address the message will be sent from.
  4. Enter the "To" email address. This will be the recipient of the email that describes which workflow was disabled, along with any errors associated. This email can be whoever makes the most sense in your use case, whether it be a System Administrator, the workflow owner, or any other valid email address.
  5. Enter the text to appear in the subject line. The values surrounded by percent (%) signs indicate dynamic values that will be pulled from the workflow results.
  6. Add any necessary attachments.
  7. Enter the text to appear in the body of the email.
  8. Click "OK".
That's it! The workflow will now send notification emails to a chosen email address in the event a workflow is disabled. This can help alleviate the pain point of not knowing when or why a workflow was disabled.

image.pngimage.png

Additional Resources

Comments
TomDiroff
Alteryx
Alteryx

Hi @londonhanson  Is there a way to update an entire environment's workflows to  sent this sort of email?  Otherwise it looks to be quite a task to edit each one 

 

Nice article!

londonhanson
Alteryx
Alteryx

Hi @TomDiroff that's a great point. I've made this dynamic workflow that should add an "email on error" event to all workflows in the same folder. Feel free to let me know if you have any questions or ideas for improvement! Thank you for the idea 🙂

https://drop.alteryx.com/public/file/7qJJRIIi-0iH3f-DxlEcSA/AddEmailEventDynamic.yxmd

salbol1
8 - Asteroid

Hello @londonhanson -

 

We are getting ever so more convoluted with how we have to utilize our smtp relays these days, and now we're going thru authentication needs with STARTTLS sends that you can readily view in the XML to understand the regex structure you're Find/Replacing with - excellent! My question is what hashing techniques is the engine utilizing when generating the password element? I'm running 2021.4.2.02731 and I've utilized MD5_ASCII, MD5_UTF8 and those don't appear to get me there if I'm only looking at resultant string length when testing. 

salbol1_0-1662764915166.png

I just want to make sure I can pass the correct hashing into the engine, because the plans are to utilize something like this to mass-change the underlying structure of those modules where we have to effect a PW change every 90 days!

londonhanson
Alteryx
Alteryx

Hi @salbol1

 

Thanks for reaching out. I have consulted with my colleagues and after some testing, we discovered the following:

  • If the SMTP password is inserted directly in the workflow XML, escaping as necessary, upon the workflow being opened in Designer the value will be hashed. The event successfully executes.
  • If the SMTP password is inserted directly in the workflow XML, escaping as necessary, upon the workflow being executed via command line (AlteryxEngineCmd.exe) the value remains plaintext. The event successfully executes.
londonhanson
Alteryx
Alteryx

@salbol1 However, if you're looking to implement a single password solution, we would suggest utilizing our new Data Connection Manager (DCM) with the Email Tool or Send Email Events. DCM is centralized storage for credentials and data sources, which allows you to update a password for many workflows from a single location.

londonhanson
Alteryx
Alteryx

The above workflow link for Dynamic events has expired. Please use this one:

https://drop.alteryx.com/public/file/4sgBb-FjCUWSnBcdwOyngQ/AddEmailEventDynamic.yxmd