How Alteryx IT Uses Alteryx

[jvw85]

Author:

Jaland Worley

Role:

Team Lead, Command Center

Company:

Alteryx

Overview of Use Case

Alteryx IT started using Designer to help create custom reports out of Active Directory and other monitoring tools that would otherwise be impossible to automate or require significant time and extensive knowledge of scripting with PowerShell.

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve

• We needed reports that could determine if components of IT followed domain and other security policies.
• The entire Alteryx organization is affected by this, as following these security policies is paramount to our operation.
• We have many PowerShell wizards here, but what we don’t have is time. We always hear the stories about how much time our product saves our customers. We were curious to give it a shot.     

Describe your working solution

• We needed to be able to connect to Active Directory to pull the data in to work with.
• We used Designer for this, and we purchased a third-party ODBC driver from cData to connect to Active Directory.
• Our Active Directory is replicated across many different geographic locations.
• We use the Reporting tools to e-mail reports out of Designer.
• We have about eight workflows now that tells us if user and computer accounts are stale, disabled, haven’t been logged into, are not in compliance with password policies, in the wrong organizational unit, using an unsupported operating system, etc., and we are really just scratching the surface here.
  
  

Active Directory AppsSample of one of our standard workflows

Describe the benefits you have achieved

My team is able to turn requests around for reports within a day or two, due to how intuitive Designer is. This is valuable to our team because this information is hard to put together, and it is stressful when there is so much other work going on to have to worry about reporting. It awesome to share these with our team and the world, so IT professionals everywhere can stop wasting so much time, paying third-parties, failing audits, and leaving their environments at unknown risk because they don’t have the time to quickly put this information together.   

My administrator, Jon Brooks, who has taken the plunge into it is seeing a lot of professional growth with the software. It gives him confidence, as he has added a lot of value to our team with it; and he has fun with it.  He has been participating in the beta certification training program, and he should pass the first certification exam soon.

[STAR1BANU]

Hi guys, i like this workflow, you can share with us