Alteryx Auto Insights on VPC

Last modified: December 19, 2022

Understand the requirements for deploying Alteryx Auto Insights to a virtual private cloud (VPC) environment.

Virtual Machine (VM) Requirements

Deployment on client VPC requires a dedicated Virtual Machine (VM) to host Auto Insights. All components of Auto Insights are deployed to this VM.

Hardware Requirements

16 CPU cores
128 GB RAM
500 GB (100GB minimum) data disk

Operating System

Ubuntu 18.04 or new (20.04 recommended)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

Access

Required access to the Auto Insights VM:

SSH with Sudo access level for deployment, ongoing troubleshooting, and maintenance
HTTP/HTTPS for accessing Auto Insights (We recommend Google Chrome Version 60+)

Cloud Providers

In AWS, we recommend an r4.4xlarge instance or above.
In Microsoft Azure, we recommend a Standard E16 instance or above.
In Google Cloud Platform, we recommend n2-highmem-16 or above.

Software Requirements

OS Software

Docker 20.10
Docker Compose 1.22.0
Ansible 2.11
Git Client
Python 3.6.9
Python PIP
Yum-utils (Redhat base) or APT (Debian/Ubuntu base)
device-mapper-persistent-data
LVM2
bzip2
tar

Python PIP Packages

Jinja2

Docker Hub Images

Alpine–Latest
MySQL 5.7

Network Requirements

Domain Name

A human-readable domain name within a domain familiar to your end-users (for example, alteryxautoinsights.yourdomainname.com).
Trusted SSL Certificate for the nominated domain.
The domain name should point to the Auto Insights VM.

Firewall and Allowlist

Inbound

All inbound access to the Auto Insights VM is via:

HTTP/HTTPS ports (80/443)
SSH port (22)

Outbound

For maximum effectiveness, Auto Insights connects to additional resources on your VPC and the public internet at runtime.

Front-end runtime (from end-user workstations):

https://*.autoinsights.alteryxcloud.com

Back-end runtime (from the Auto Insights VM):

Email Server–Auto Insights requires access to the client's mail servers (SMTP + IMAP) for email functionalities such as inviting users, resetting passwords, and automated insights delivered through email. We recommend creating a dedicated email account for Auto Insights.

Database

Auto Insights requires access to internal databases or warehouses for automatic data refresh. You have to allowlist the Auto Insights VM for the database. Gather this database information to set up a database connection in Auto Insights:

Database Type
Database Server Name / URL / IP
Port
Database Schema Name
Username and Password with read permission
Names of the tables, views, or SQL script

For a full list of supported databases, please refer to this list.

Network Requirements During Deployment

Auto Insights requires ongoing access to a few internet resources in order to install dependencies, deploy components and provide regular updates. Allowlist the following resources for Auto Insights VM to access:

In the event that you can't add listed resources to your allowlist, a proxy-based approach could work.

Docker Connectivity

Please perform a docker pull alpine to ensure the successful network connectivity of the docker daemon. If you are using a proxy then add this configuration to /etc/systemd/system/docker.service.d/http-proxy.conf:

[Service]
Environment "HTTP_PROXY=http://proxy.example.com:80"
Environment"HTTPS_PROXY=https://proxy.example.com:443"

After changing the configuration, restart the docker daemon.

View Docker Proxy information with:

docker info | grep Proxy
HTTP Proxy:http://proxy.example.com:80
HTTPS Proxy:https://proxy.example.com:443