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Alteryx License Server Reservations

Administrators can reserve product access for specific users via Reservation Groups. This ensures that users have access to the products and features that they need.

Tip

See Alteryx License Server Partitions for latest reservation options.

Requirements and Prerequisites

To use the Reservation Group feature in Alteryx License Server, you need Alteryx Designer 2021.1 or newer.

Reservation JSON File

To reserve a product for a specific user, first make sure that the product has enough seats available.

Next, you must create a JSON file that contains definitions for a new Reservation Group that itself contains definitions for 1 or more reservations. You can use the sample file below as a template.

  • Note that you can't use the same name value for multiple reservation groups. As a best practice, we suggest to use the username hostId associated with the reservation as the reservation name.

  • A reservation file includes a hostId that identifies a client device or a specific user.

  • Each reservation definition should contain 1 or more reservation entries. An entry includes a featureName and the featureCount.

  • You need to save the file on the same machine as the Alteryx License Server installation. You also need to run all of the commands on the Alteryx License Server.

  • Save the file in the same directory as the flexnetlsadmin file, which by default is located in C:\Program Files\Alteryx\LicenseServer\enterprise.

Sample Reservation File

This sample file defines a Reservation Group call sample user that contains a reservation for 1 hostId, a user with the value of sample.user@email.com.

    {
   "name":"sample user",
   "reservations":[
      {
         "hostId":{
            "type":"USER",
            "value":"sample.user@email.com"
         },
         "reservationEntries":[
            {
               "featureName":"Alteryx_Designer",
               "featureVersion":"1.0",
               "featureCount":1
            },
            {
               "featureName":"FlowChartMode",
               "featureVersion":"1.0",
               "featureCount":1
            }
         ]
      }
   ]
}

Alteryx Products and Associated Features

Refer to this table for the featureName values associated with each Alteryx product.

These are the values that you need to add to your reservation file per product. For example, if you want to reserve the Alteryx Designer product, you need to include the Alteryx_Designer and FlowChartMode Feature Names, as shown in the above sample file.

Add Reservations

Once you have a valid license and you have created and customized your JSON file...

  1. If your license is not yet installed, via the command line navigate to C:/Program Files/Alteryx/LicenseServer/Enterprise. Otherwise, skip to step 4.

  2. Run flexnetlsadmin -server http://localhost:7070 -authorize admin [Password] -activate -id LICENSE_KEY -count 1 to install the license.

  3. To check that the license was properly installed and is available, run licenseserveradmincmd.exe -s http://localhost:7070 -u admin -p [Password] -l. This should show the newly installed license key with 1 available seat.

  4. Run flexnetlsadmin -server http://localhost:7070 -authorize admin [Password] -reservations -load RESERVE.json. This command reserves the specified product for the specified hostId(sample.user@email.com) in our sample file, called RESERVE.json.

  5. Now, the specified user (hostID) can run Alteryx, access the Manage License window, and activate their reserved product. The product is not available to other users.

Hold Active Seats for Later Use

What if you have multiple active seats that you don't want to reserve for specific users, but also don't want to make them available to any other users?

For example, let's say you have 3 active Designer seats on the license server, but you only want sample.user@email.com to be able to activate an use the product at this time ( and nobody else.)

In this scenario, you can create a reservation group for sample.user@email.com and also create a separate dummy reservation group for the remaining 2 Designer seats.

Create Dummy Reservation Group

To create a dummy reservation group, follow the process to create a typical reservation group with some minor adjustments:

  • Use a dummy email address for the user (for example, fake.user@email.com and use this as the value in the hostId field.) As a best practice, you should use the email address in the reservation group name value as well.

  • Set the featureCount value in JSON file to the number of seats that you want to hold. We set the count to 2 (since there are 2 remaining seats in our example.) These seats will not be availble for any actual users to activate.

To free up a dummy seat for an actual user...

  1. Delete the dummy reservation group that you previously created to hold the unused seats.

  2. Create a new reservation group for the user that now needs access.

  3. If you still need to hold 1 or more of the seats for later use, create a new dummy reservation and make sure to update the featureCount field to account for any seats that are already active. In our above example, we would create a new dummy list with a featureCount of 1 if we released 1 of the 2 seats that were previously reserved under the dummy group.

Keep in mind that when you create dummy reservation groups, the hostId that you assign them to should also be a dummy email address so an actual use doesn't have access to the reservation.

View Reservations

You can use the -reservations option to retrieve a list of existing Reservation Groups. The list includes the group IDs that you need to manage reservations at a group level.

Retrieve List of Reservation Groups

Use this command to retrieve a list of Reservation Groups:

flexnetlsadmin -server http://localhost:7070/api/1.0/instances/~ http://localhost:7070 -authorize admin [Password] --reservations

Retrieve Details for Specific Reservation Group

Use this command to retrieve details for a specific Reservation Group (where 123 is the group ID retrieved via the previous command):

flexnetlsadmin -server http://localhost:7070/api/1.0/instances/~ http://localhost:7070 -authorize admin [Password] --reservations -group 123

Delete Reservations

You can delete entire Reservation Groups or specific reservations.

Delete Reservation Group

To delete a Reservation Group, run this command:

flexnetlsadmin -server http://localhost:7070/api/1.0/instances/~ http://localhost:7070 -authorize admin [Password] --reservations --delete -group 123

Use the -group option to specify the group ID.

Delete Specific Reservation

flexnetlsadmin -server http://localhost:7070/api/1.0/instances/~ http://localhost:7070 -authorize admin [Password] --reservations --delete -group 1 -reservation 123

  • Use the -group option to specify the group ID.

  • Use the -reservation option to specify the reservation ID.

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