Alteryx Server Ideas

Hello all,

According to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webhook

"A webhook in web development is a method of augmenting or altering the behavior of a web page or web application with custom callbacks. These callbacks may be maintained, modified, and managed by third-party users and developers who may not necessarily be affiliated with the originating website or application. "

An example : whoever publishes an asset, I receive a notification on Teams and when a scheduling task fails, it creates automatically an analysis task on Trello.

Seems cool, huh?

Guys at Tableau have implemented it (https://help.tableau.com/current/developer/webhooks/en-us/ ) and so do the guys for Qlik Cloud.

Best regards,

Simon

Idea: Option to receive an email notification when a schedule gets disabled (could be added in the user settings, see attached picture)

Business Impact: The implementation of this idea would reduce delays that might even have a financial impact because

not receiving any notifications when a schedule was disabled could lead to

• important processes not being executed and users realizing that only at a later point in time (>> potential financial impact and stress)
• the user not being able deliver a report in time (>> potential financial impact)
• huge effort to manually track the workflow results on the server (or email notifications after a successfull run) to avoid the above two bullet points (>> financial impact due to waste of time)

I would be glad if you could implement this idea because I think it would be useful for a lot of people!

Today, when you share a workflow with someone else through the collection, you cannot see the manual run that the person will do, neither the person will see yours. 

This is really annoying as this is not helping collaboration between colleagues. 

Since we use an external scheduler and the server api, only the job owner will see the job execution results within the gallery.

Idea here would be to let the sharing of job execution result as an option in the collection.

Given the security requirements of our company collections need to be created centrally, which is fine for sub-organizations that only require one collection. However, the large sub-orgs require more than 1 collection, ideally we would create the top-level collection and give the sub-org the access to create their own sub-collection within that collection, but not the ability to create collections at the top-level.

Hi Alteryx support team,

We would like to use the search functionality available in the schedules tab of Alteryx gallery and when anyone searches the schedule by typing the name in search box on schedules tab, he/she should get list of the results along with the schedule information such as frequency of schedule, times run etc.

As of now, when one searches results are displayed as jobs and their run history.

Case reference -  Alteryx, Inc Case # 00606791

Regards,

milan

I am noticing what I think it's a big gap in terms of turnover and job changes.  Even though you can add workflows to a Collection for development and update purposes. Only the original owner/publisher can see the version history for a workflow. At least that appears to be the case in 2020.1

Is there any discussion for the road map to include a way to transfer the ownership of a workflow from one user to another? this would alleviate the need to publish a brand new version and then reset all the scheduling. 

It would be great if you could overwrite an existing workflow when saving to the gallery from designer. It could be a simple popup with a yes/no option to overwrite/save a new copy. Currently, you would have to

1) Save your workflow to the Gallery.

2) Click on ok and be taken to that workflow.

3) Go back to your private studio.

4) Search for the app you want to replace.

5) Realize you have 7 copies of the same workflow with the same name and try to determine which one you want to replace. (this could just be a "me" problem)

6) Select that app

7) Click on replace workflow.

😎 type the name of the workflow in the box.

9) Look through your list of 7 workflows and choose the one that was just uploaded. Usually the first in the list I think.

10) Lament that it took way too many steps.

I recognize that you can open workflows from the gallery in designer which does allow overwriting, but I've run into issues with 1) external dependencies not working as expected (ie packaged assets don't quite work the way I want) and 2) about half the time it will simply give you root errors and then your only option is to save to a folder and then go through the process above.

Hello all,

This may be a little controversial. As of today, when you buy an Alteryx Server, the basic package covers up to 4 cores :
https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Knowledge-Base/How-Alteryx-defines-cores-for-licensi...

I have always known that. But these last years, the technology, the world has evolved. Especially the number of cores in a server. As an example, AMD Epyc CPU for server begin at 8 cores :
https://www.amd.com/en/processors/epyc-7002-series

So the idea is to update the number of cores in initial package for 8 or even 16 cores. It would :
-make Alteryx more competitive
-cost only very few money
-end some user frustration

Moreover, Alteryx Server Additional Capacity license should be 4 cores.

Best regards,

Simon

I've seen various solutions/workarounds but this seems to be a table-stakes ask?  When scheduling a workflow I should be able to specify which parameter values to run with.  Just two of many use case examples - 

Use case #1 - a single analytic app could be scheduled multiple times, each schedule specifying a different line of business

Use case #2 - credentials, allow the user to schedule a workflow with their saved credentials.  When their credentials change all they would have to do is update the schedule parameters

(If you know a better way I'm all ears, not the API thought that isn't a bad way to do it, just not super Easy)

I would like to see the enhancement of being able to schedule a start and stop time for specific jobs that need to run multiple times per day, so they don't run during the nightly backup periods of the Alteryx server. This can cause the daily backups of the Alteryx Gallery to fail. Currently SQL Server Management Studio/SQL Server has the function to able to schedule start and stop times for specific job. Currently Scheduler page on Alteryx Gallery/Server lacks this feature.

SQL Server Management Studio

Schedules on Alteryx Gallery/Server

As the title says: please make the date modified data more granular e.g. yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM:SS and not 6 months ago

The current behaviour is the same in designer & browser, but is more important in browser (first screenshot) as there isn't an indicator or method or sorting the order.

We leverage Active Directory groups to manage user permissions to most of our company's resources like databases, file shares, applications, etc.  This idea is for the ability to manage a Gallery Data Connection via an Active Directory group.  In many cases, our AD group membership actually dictates what permissions a gallery connection should have, but we must manually add/remove users to the Alteryx connection to keep it synched with AD.

I think there are several ways Alteryx could be enhanced to support this; i.e. the AD group could be specified on the connection itself or it could be inherited from a Studio where the subscription is enhanced to support assigning AD groups to it (which could benefit other areas of Alteryx).

I'm told by Alteryx support that this functionality is unsupported but to post the idea here.  If anyone knows of workarounds to this limitation I'd certainly be interested!

This idea has been touted in different flavours over the years (but not implemented), but I'd like to push it a little further:

1. Create the ability to collaboratively edit an Alteryx workflow - e.g. like you can edit Microsoft documents collaboratively. If the front-end is primarily an XML interface, this should in theory be possible?

2. Version control (not version tracking) - i.e. automatically state the differences in scripts between versions and allow for checking in and checking out of code

3. Power BI & Tableau Prep have the ability to see exactly what changes were made and to reverse steps to get back to a specific stage of development: it would be great to have a panel that tracks all the edits you've made since you started editing the workflow

In simple terms, a modern, interactive way for multiple developers to work together, but also to encourage the use of Server to "check in" your application and to avoid developers saving the same file over & over again locally.

A nice to have is a connector for Microsoft Flow to trigger workflows.  With Microsoft Flow, users can automate processes, or set conditions that can trigger services across many different providers.  

Having the ability to use a Microsoft Flow can enable alteryx users to run workflows and feed in data that could be used by Microsoft Flow to feed into other processes. 

This would be a game changer for many users.

Given the need for administrators to be able to perform analysis and monitoring on server performance; user usage etc - it is necessary to provide full documentation for both the API and the database underlying the server so that admins can use this to good effect.

Ref: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Discussions/Server-API-Download-packages-for-surveil...

Although very limited documentation is available on the server API (https://gallery.alteryx.com/api-docs) what we're looking for is a much more fully formed and navigable experience like some of the examples below.

• https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/server/en-us/data_dictionary.html
• https://onlinehelp.tableau.com/current/api/rest_api/en-us/help.htm#REST/rest_api.htm%3FTocPath%3D___...
• https://community.lithium.com/t5/Developer-Documentation/bd-p/dev-doc-portal?section=commv2

This will make building helper processes substantially easier; as well as allow admins to fully manage their environment.

Many thanks

S

cc: @HeatherMHarris @revathi @AshwiniChezhiyan @LizaNemchynova

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 when scheduling workflows, there is an option to schedule based on the calendar day but not on business day. For example, if I want to run a workflow on Business Day 1 of every month, it is not necessarily the first day of every Month. For the month of June 2019, Business Day 1 is June 3rd, since the 1st and 2nd fall on the weekend. Many departments run their processes on Business Days rather than Calendar days. Also factoring Holidays into consideration would be a plus since January 1st for example is a Holiday, Business Day 1 would fall on the 2nd.

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

Add Admin ability to place the Alteryx Service (Engine) into Maintenance mode allowing current workflows to complete, but all new workflow processing moved into Queue to allow for server configuration and/or maintenance.

Currently, if I want to make a small configuration change (like a memory setting in the Runtime settings) I have to hunt for a quiet window or the lowest level of activity to kill the service (and the running jobs).

It would be helpful to flip a 'switch' and have all new jobs go into 'Queue' allowing for the change and service stop/restart ... then pick right back up with the queue in configured order. (execution time, priority level, etc...)