Alteryx Server has always been a powerful and key aspect of any company’s investment in the Alteryx platform. It capitalizes on functionality around sharing, scheduling, and governance capabilities.
However, leveraging Alteryx Server to its fullest potential is a daunting task, even for those with years of experience.
The challenges of managing and monitoring the usage of Alteryx Server, especially for companies that rely on this powerful data analytics platform to support their business operations, can definitely be improved.
The Alteryx’s Server Usage Report was created to assist in this undertaking and to help Alteryx admins gain important insights into their deployment to improve support of the administration of Alteryx Server.
Unfortunately, it was recently announced that this report is going to be deprecated on version 22.3.
With that news, many Alteryx admins may feel they are left without a reliable way to track and optimize the usage of their Alteryx Server.
Let’s level-set here: While that news might bum our admin friends out, let’s keep in mind that Alteryx’s Server Usage Report was, frankly, basic and limited in its capabilities. It only provided simple usage metrics and didn’t give a complete picture of how the Alteryx Server was actually being used.
This made it difficult for companies to understand how to optimize their usage of the platform or identify any potential issues.
With that being said, the Alteryx ACEs and experts from phData have created an Alteryx Server Monitoring & Reporting (ASMR) tool that will help businesses utilize the previous functions of the usage report—all with expanded and actionable insights baked into their Alteryx environments.
In this blog, you’ll learn more about phData’s ASMR tool and its capabilities. Let’s dive in!
What is the Alteryx Server Monitoring & Reporting Tool?
The Alteryx Server Monitoring & Reporting tool provides usage reporting, proactive insights, and expert-supported updates to better serve our clients that leverage the Alteryx platform.
Supported by years of experience managing Alteryx Servers for small, medium, and large companies, we understand the recurring pain points and key data points that help form a complete and supported analytics product—all with the importance of presenting that data in an interactive, insightful, and visual way with a Tableau or Power BI Dashboard.
These generated insights aim to help administrators manage the environment more proactively, and provide users with visibility into their assets.
Additionally, the implementation of the ASMR tool is simple, safe, and easy. It will also continue to be supported by phData.
Why is the Alteryx Server Monitoring & Reporting Tool Important?
With the Alteryx Server Usage Report, administrators needed additional ways of generating analytics reports and insights for their Alteryx Servers, workarounds, customizations, and hacks.
Now with the deprecation of the Usage Report, they will require another solution even more.
The goal of our tool is to simplify and accelerate actionalbe insights into Alteryx Server environments.
This can only be accomplished via a robust and intuitive reporting interface. Without that, errors in the Alteryx Server can take much more time to be solved. Our product ensures Alteryx administrators can understand, analyze, and troubleshoot the following, with ease:
- Jobs: In the Jobs page, administrators are able to see several statistics regarding workflows run in the Gallery (this part aids in identifying issues relating to slow workflow runs, workers’ demand, and scheduling issues, among others).
- Users: This will show an overview of all the users in the Gallery, their roles, and logins, and even allow the administrator to dive deep into specifics about certain users’ access & permissions, and evaluate their Alteryx skillset
- Workflows: All workflow details will be under this. Administrators are able to check duplicate workflows, workflows that use advanced tools, data sources, and performance, aiding to identify possible bottlenecks and errors in the Gallery.
- And Much More!
What Are Some Examples of Issues the Alteryx Server Monitoring & Reporting Tool Helped Solve?
1. Multiple Emails Being Sent on a Scheduled Workflow
One of our clients was facing an issue where multiple emails were being sent when it should only be sending one. By checking a user’s schedules page, only a single workflow was there.
By running the ASMR tool and checking the Jobs section, we identified that two other users had also scheduled the workflow to run at the same time due to a miscommunication.
All of the involved were alerted, and a single schedule was left at the end.
2. Manually Ran Workflows are Taking Longer Than Expected
A client asked why many of the small workflows they were running manually from the Gallery were taking so long to run.
This happened on a single-node environment where, by using the ASMR, we identified under the Sessions and Jobs sections that those bottlenecks were happening during high-usage hours. Many users were running workflows at the same time and the Gallery worker was not able to handle all the requests at once and had to queue most of the jobs the users requested.
3. Checking if no Workflows Were Connected to an Old Database
A company migrated its database from SQL Server to the Snowflake Data Cloud and wanted to make sure all workflows were updated accordingly to not connect to the SQL Server anymore.
By using the Alteryx Server Monitoring & Reporting Tool workflows section, we were able to check all data sources used on workflows in the Gallery and quickly answer the company’s questions about this migration.
Closing
In short, if you are leveraging Alteryx Server and want to make sure that your environment is being supported and monitored with a best-in-class mindset, you’ll value timely response on incidents/errors, precise numbers for forecasting and planning for usage, and presenting this information via your visualization platform of choice, via easy-to-understand dashboards.
If you’re interested to test or deploy phData’s Alteryx Server Monitoring & Reporting tool in your environment, or want to test-to-trust Alteryx administration duties with our team here, reach out today!
