Alteryx Server Ideas

Alteryx DCM has been an incredibly useful addition that supports key security concerns from companies. Currently, only three external key vaults are supported:

• Hashicorp Vault (KV secrets engine) - supported for Designer 22.3 and later.

• CyberArk Conjur - supported for Designer 22.3 and later.

• AWS Secrets Manager

https://help.alteryx.com/current/en/designer/tools/dcm---designer/dcm-external-vaults.html## 

I propose that we also include Delinea Secret Server.

Thank you and hopefully we can start to add more to make this feature widely useable and support security compliance.

When scheduling workflows in the gallery that are recurring, it would be beneficial to have  start and end times also. For example, when setting the frequency to hourly, if there is an option to run between 9 AM and 5 PM that would be great. This would prevent us to schedule workflows for all 24 hours and take up systemic resources when other important workflows could run instead

Maintaining multiple workers (five currently, soon, six) with identical setups is challenging when dealing with In-Database (InDb) connections. I must log in to each worker, start Alteryx Designer, go to In-Db settings, and create the connection. This also becomes tedious when trying to update passwords, which occurs every 90 days in my company.

The suggestion is to set up an In-Db connection on one worker and have it propagate to the other workers. 

Propagates to other workers →

This would save time maintaining workers in the gallery and help prevent errors during setup on each worker (e.g., typing in the wrong password).

As an "extra credit" mission, expose In-Db connections through an API that can list, create, update, or delete an In-Db connection.

Current State:

Currently, all workflows and applications are in list-form within "My Workspace" (formerly Private Studio) and Collections.  In My Workspace, I might have workflows and applications that support a broad range of domain spaces and audiences.  As the developer (or Artisan), they're all in My Workspace, but shown as an exhaustive list with no categorization unless I name them to represent not only the function of the workflow/application but also the domain. 

Once those same workflows/applications are moved to collections, there can exist confusion over whether the workflow/application is intended for a schedule, manual run, or application.  Separating by naming convention gets messy and degrades clarity for non-developer roles.

Proposed Solution:

I would like to see folders, only one or two levels deep, be added to My Workspace and to Collections.  This proposed solution would not alter permissions, as those would be common for the parent collection and any assigned roles would function the same for that entire collection.  The solution is simply adding organization to enhance the user experience.

For example:  I might have a Collection that is intended for my Finance team....

Finance_Collection / Scheduled_ETL_Workflows / Workflows

Finance_Collection / Scheduled_Analytic_Workflows / Workflows
Finance_Collection / Applications_for_AccountingDepartment_ReceivablesTeam / Workflows
Finance_Collection / Applications_for_AccountingDepartment_PayablesTeam / Workflows
Finance_Collection / Manual_ETL_Workflows / Workflows

Finance_Collection / Manual_Analytic_Workflows / Workflows

Finance_Collection / etc...

All persons who have been assigned the role connected to the "Finance Collection" will still see everything in all of the folders but would have a better sense of what "workflows/applications" are intended for their use according to the folders the workflows/applications are organized into.

Value Added (Why This Matters):

• Enhanced user experience (easier to find the correct workflows
• The volume of roles and collections can be reduced, thus reducing Admin strain
• The solution does not impact roles and permissions
• Overall management of workflows and applications is enhanced for the Artisans

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I welcome input and feedback from the community and would appreciate your support if you find this suggestion useful for your Alteryx experience!

Hello all,

According to https://openlineage.io/ 

An open framework for data lineage collection and analysis

Data lineage is the foundation for a new generation of powerful, context-aware data tools and best practices. OpenLineage enables consistent collection of lineage metadata, creating a deeper understanding of how data is produced and used.

 
This is typically the open standards needed for lineage analysis and I think it will become more and more a differenciator with your competitors. As of today, DBT or Apache Airflow already supports it (as producer), Egeria or Marquez already support it (as consumer) and guys from Datahub are working on it  (as consumers)https://feature-requests.datahubproject.io/p/openlineage
So I think Alteryx should implement this standard API as a producer, it's the next big thing in Data Governance and you don't want to stay behind !

Best regards,

Simon

I just underwent an exercise of recovering my controller in the event of a catastrophic failure. One of the steps is to recover the DCME keys (DCM Encryption keys) - which is documented here: https://help.alteryx.com/20221/en/server/install/server-host-recovery-guide/dcme-keys-to-backup.html...

This DCME recovery needs to be revisited. This document assumes that the previous controller is running. In a disaster recovery situation, this is not possible. What, if any, can be done to recover the DCME keys if the host has is completely irrecoverable?

For context, having an irrecoverable host has happened. Complete hard drive failure (showing my age), nuked virtual machine and its backups (no one paid attention to the notices that the data center was shutting down), and fire.

Previously, Alteryx Gallery had a progress bar when the job is running. However, it has been removed in the newer version and the screen only appear blank when the job is running. This could lead to confusion in users as they might be wondering what is happening when the screen goes blank when it actually is running the job. Users might also attempt to click the run button repeatedly due to this.

Hence, I hope Alteryx could bring back the old UI that showed progress bar or anything similar when the job is running so users will aware of what is happening. 

When I create a DCM Entry in Gallery, it would be great if the users I share it with would also be able to reference the credentials in their desktop designer when they sync their connections to the Gallery. 

Hello all,

Nowadays, chatting, commenting, having a discussion on assets that are published on a server is a very common feature, and a useful one !

Here an example on Tableau :

Collaboration is not a luxury item !

Best regards,

Simon

When you add a workflow you have to add its schedule to share the results in collection menber's.
A workflow can be in several collections and therefore different users can schedule it. (why not)
This results in multiple schedules for the same workflow. There is no reason why a workflow cannot have multiple schedules.(mandatory in some cases)

Automatically adding schedules to the collection would allow users to see that there is already a schedule on the workflows in question and not to recreate one!

it should also be possible to create a schedule from the collection.

Currently, we see the Districts and Collections now compressed into a list view. 

Previously, the Server had the widgets feature which really showcased the self-service nature of the Sever. Losing that just made decreased the emphasis on user experience. 

It would be great to allow Server Admins to decide whether they want lists or widgets to be available toggles as a design feature for both districts and collections will be of great help.

In addition, regardless of the option, the image size and wording size should be much larger - easier for people to see. Right now, we have to zoom to 150% to make it easier for ourselves to see. Having the ability to control font size, font control with bolds, italtics, etc. will be very helpful as well.

When scheduling an analytical app on Gallery, there is no UI for submitting app values. This significantly limits the value of scheduling workflows and using analytical apps. With this feature, it would allow our users to have more flexible scheduling while also simply maintaining one workflow. Because this feature doesn't exist, we have had to build workarounds by either creating multiple workflows or utilizing APIs. 

Since this feature is already available for manual runs and APIS (shown below), it shouldn't be a reach to also have this feature when scheduling a run.

Manual Method:

API Method: GET /workflows/{appId}/questions

Scheduling Method (no app questions): 

Hi all,

In an enterprise environment - DB connections need to be set up from the server and pushed down to your users; and they need to be managed across the various servers in your software lifecycle.

In other words - you may have a sandpit / dev server env; a UAT env; a pre-prod; and a prod env - and each of these need to have the same DCM credential IDs so that users can access these.     

(before you say "you can do this from the desktop) - that is true, however that's not a workable solution in an enterprise env because that means that users can change the password from their desktop into a prod env which is a breach of IT General Controls)

The solution here is to break DCM out in to a separate service - where

- all your servers (dev; UAT; Pre-Prod; Prod) can all point to one instance of DCM

- users can maintain their own connections and credentials

        - Each needs to have up to 2 owners so that you can deal with people moving jobs / leaving the firm

- users can also entitle these connections and credentials to their team members so that when the team member logs in, it shows a popup saying "you've just been given access to new credentials / connections"

- A particular connection may have multiple different variants - depending on the environment.

        - HR Data may point to a UAT version of HR data if you're on the UAT server; and to Prod if you're on the Prod server

        - if a connection is environment specific - then it also needs to have segregated credentials (since the login to your UAT HR Data may not be the same as prod).

Thank you all

sean

cc: @wesley-siu @_PavelP 

In an enterprise multi-node Alteryx Server deployment that has existed for many years and many upgrades, there are artifacts within the MongoDB that are unknown to Gallery Administrators. I envision a workflow or app that is developed by Alteryx that queries the MongoDB and looks for orphaned documents in the MongoDB across all collections. With 2022.3 there is a pre-upgrade check, however, it does not find all unexpected items within the MongoDB. Regular ongoing MongoDB health helps with overall management of the environment and could prompt for support cases before it becomes a problem during pre-upgrade activities.

Hello all,


Alteryx Designer Cloud is quite young, somehow incomplete, not compatible with Alteryx Desktop etc... but I'm very optimistic than in a few years it will become a killing app !

That said, I'm more skeptical on this race to the cloud : from my experience, Cloud should just be one way of selling a product, not the only one. It has a lot of cons and a lot of pros and customers should have the possibility to choose between "on-premise" and "cloud"  product, and change from one to the other very easily.

My main customer on Alteryx is a government agency that deals with highly confidential, personal data. They won't go to cloud. Not in the next ten years. But they would love to have the Alteryx Designer Cloud on their own server.

Best regards,

Simon

Improve Gallery scheduling to allow the end user to specify company denoted Holidays when scheduling a workflow. If the workflow is scheduled on a Holiday the schedule would not run. This should be configurable per workflow schedule. Example: A daily report Monday through Friday would be able to skip Holidays based off a Holiday exclusion list. 

My team has started using an Alteryx Gallery 2022.1 instance and we have workflows that take a few minutes to run. Whenever we run a workflow, we are presented with a blank screen instead of the progress bar that we are used to in previous versions of the Gallery. I was wondering if there is a way of enabling the progress bar or at least setting up a load screen to notify the user that the workflow is in progress to avoid them wanting to re-run the application because “nothing is happening”.

This is what we are seeing:

This is what we are used to and would want to see when running our applications:

after run workflow in server, it has to download output files one by one. it very annoying when the number is huge.

please change like other platform like SharePoint etc. enable select all options and/or download all options.

We want to share direct links to analytics apps with our users.  However this does not work with our current SAML login.   This the use case.  

1. User clicks on direct link URL for the app  

2. User  is required to click log-in button

3. After login user is taking to the gallery home page not to the app

The end effect is that we cannot share links to apps with our casual users, instead we have to instruct them to go to the gallery log in and then search all public workflows for the specific app they are looking for.   Not a great user experience, especially because we did not have this issue before single sign on support. 

personally I think this is bug more than a feature request, but was asked to create it as a request by support