Written in collaboration with @JoshH
In the blog, “Top 10 Alteryx Server FAQs”, one of the top frequently asked questions on managing an Alteryx Server, is how to monitor the deployment. Whether it’s to adhere to a data governance program, to track your usage and ROI or how to best optimize your Alteryx Server, administrators need and want monitoring and reporting capabilities. To help with this, we are pleased to announce the availability of a new Alteryx Server Usage Reporting app. This workflow provides valuable data and insights to user access content, scheduled jobs and job analysis information about your server and can be visualized in either a Tableau Workbook or to a set of PDF and Excel files. You can begin your download by going to licenses.alteryx.com and clicking on the most recent Alteryx Server release link.
Click on the Alteryx Server Usage Report Demo to learn more:
The Dashboards
The packaged workflow that runs in Alteryx Designer and outputs to Tableau presents you with four basic dashboards:
- User Access
- Job Analysis
- Content
- Scheduling
User Access
The User Access dashboard displays all of your Studios, how many users are in the Studio and the type of user. This valuable information provides details on of the number of users that have access to the Server and their role; for example, are they are Artisans or Curators and what they have access to. The User Access dashboard also provides insight on the activity of the users to help identify low activity users and who hasn’t logged in within a certain amount of time. You can also monitor login history for each user. It shows when they logged in, how long their session was. The last view within the User Access dashboard shows the logins by time of day. This is helpful in identifying where your peak usage hours are by easily identifying the time of day and day of the week.
Job Analysis
The Job Analysis dashboard highlights all of the apps and workflows that are being run on your Server. It highlights the number of apps run, how long they ran, and details of that runtime. The Job Analysis dashboard also shows the volume of the day of the week and by the time of day. You can also view the number of apps run over time and visually see if the runs were successful, have associated warnings or even errored out. Within the run details, you can get even more information on the results of each job and details on the error messages.
Content
The content dashboard enables users to see all the different types of workflows and apps within the Server. You can see the total count of the content within each of the Studios and Collections, who the authors are, how often they have published, and the download metrics around that content. In addition, there are a number of dropdowns to quickly filter the content metrics important to you and what you want to view.
Scheduling
The Scheduling dashboard shows which scheduling and automations are enabled, when they are being ran and if they were successful or not. The highlight tables show you what day of the week jobs are being scheduled and what time of day. This is helpful for optimizing usage and identifying when to run compute intensive jobs in off-peak hours. The dashboard also provides details on scheduled jobs that had errors.
PDF and Excel Outputs
Alternatively, if you want to schedule the reports for distribution, you can create PDF and Excel reports by selecting the PDF output option. In the results view, it outputs to three different types reports: a session activity excel file, an app execution excel file and a PDF summary report. The PDF report provides an overview of the users, apps, executions and subscriptions. The app execution Excel provides detailed information on what apps were run, the status of the runs, and any errors associated with that run. Lastly there is a session activity Excel file which provides information on which users logged in and how long those sessions were.
In Summary
The Alteryx Server Usage Reporting App is now available from licenses.alteryx.com and provides a great new resource to help you effectively manage your Alteryx Server. From viewing session login details and content types to the status of scheduled jobs, administrators now have more visibility into their Alteryx Server deployments.
