Analytics Hub 2020.2 Release Notes

Release Note Product Versions
Version	Date	Release	End of Support
2020.2.0.1e045fcf	June 15, 2020	Initial	December 15, 2021
2020.2.1.96a1e709	September 24, 2020	Minor	March 24, 2022

New Features

Clean Uninstall

The uninstall process gives you a fresh environment ready for reinstall or upgrade. Uninstalling removes the following components:

• PostgreSQL. The data folder in the PostgreSQL folder isn't deleted.

• Settings.yml File

• VFS Folder

• AAH Frontend and Backend including Service Setups

• Alteryx Engine

 These components are uninstalled on Engine Worker machines:

• Alteryx Engine Worker
• Cutlass (Alteryx Service)

Upgrade

You can upgrade to the latest version of Analytics Hub with the new installer. To learn more, go to the Upgrade Analytics Hub article.

Centralized Collaboration Platform

Driving better outcomes is the end goal of analytics, but it requires empowering teams to answer questions together. The power of collaborative analytics unlocks meaningful business outcomes for modern organizations. With Alteryx Analytics Hub, every team can share analytic assets and automate processes, reports and insights in a central, secure, governed analytics environment.

Scale Analytics Across the Team

The Alteryx Analytics Hub streamlines user-level access. Unite rogue data processes existing across the organization, and help teams collaborate in secure sites with workflow version history and rollback features that add an additional layer of assurance for team collaboration.

• Business Leader: Share the great work that your team is doing and leverage analytic assets created across departments.
• IT: Provide a safe and secure environment for your organization to create, consume, and share analytics.
• Analyst: Focus on answering tougher questions when you automate and put those mundane, yet necessary, weekly status reports on cruise control.

Key Capabilities 

• Accelerate daily insights and actions and free people from manual tasks by automating repetitive and complex analytic processes.
• Flexibility to schedule workflows by date, time, and frequency for a recurring or customized ad-hoc schedule.

Share

• Seamlessly share workflows and apps from Designer to Alteryx Analytics Hub so that your teams can accomplish more together.
• Collaborate through centralized team sites that let teams share every important analytic asset.

Discover

• Leverage all the data in the organization. Access metadata from a multitude of data sources and use all of your existing infrastructures.
• Access and use all analytic assets to accelerate insights across teams and departments within your organization Security and Governance.
• Easily set up and maintain security, integrate into your current identity and user management processes (LDAP, Active Directory, SSO), free IT, and deliver the tools needed to keep analytics always on.
• Maintain security through permission-based asset management from individuals, teams, and departments.

Known Issues and Limitations

Browsers

• Analytics Hub only supports Chrome and Firefox. The use of an unsupported browser may cause issues in the application interface or other failures.

Certificates

• Depending on the provider of a CA-issued certificate, you may need to run a different ayxhub.ps1 file than the one that comes in the product. A good indicator of this problem is if you encounter errors when running analytic apps and testing connections after executing ayxhub.ps1 -https enable.
• Self-signed certificates provided by the ayxhub.ps1 script are only valid for 60 days.

Consumer Role Limitations

• Consumers can't run analytic apps with a File Browse tool.
• Consumers can't use bulk download functionality.
• Attempting to drag and drop a file into the system may cause the file to be opened in the browser - this is because consumers cannot upload files. This may also occur to users without Create permission in a folder.

Content Displayed in Tables

• Content may not be refreshed automatically after an action is performed. Refresh your browser if the content does not appear to be updating properly.
• Sorting in tables throughout the platform may be case-sensitive.
• Columns may not be able to be re-sized.
• Content may be truncated or difficult to read whenever the window size is not full screen.

Data Catalog

• Syncing in the data catalog should be done by the owner of a connection for the highest stability.
• Syncing the same data source across sites simultaneously can cause failures in the data catalog load.
• Intermittent defects may be encountered when switching ownership of credentials, connections, and data sources.
• Failed sync operations may leave entries in the data catalog that conflict with future sync attempts. This can be mitigated by using the re-run feature on the failed job within the data catalog results table.

Data Connection Management

• Descriptions are not populated for some Snowflake tables/columns.

Deleted Content and Users

• When deleting a user or removing them from a site, their content will remain and may be manually removed or transferred to new owners.
• When deleting a workflow, the schedules will remain and must be manually deleted - they will continue to run and fail.

Designer

• Some workflows that appear to fail upload may actually succeed - check Analytics Hub to confirm failure.
• A workflow with a warning but no error will appear as though it fails in workflow validation.
• ‘My Files’ is always displayed as the file location. When using ‘Save’, the workflow will be saved to its existing location, not ‘My Files’.
• Outputs are automatically packaged as dependencies which may cause a workflow extension change from YXMD/YXWZ to YXZP upon upload.
• New file versions are automatically created when uploading an existing workflow - no warning is provided.

Dialog Response Time

• Some dialogs may not immediately respond to user input as they are still processing the request. Performing the action again during this processing may cause issues. Examples where this might occur - creating a site, creating a group.

File Upload Dialog

• Issues with the dialog showing in-progress file uploads may appear when uploading a large number of files or navigating to various pages while a file is uploading.

LDAP

• Disabled user accounts are synced.
• Syncing/Input of LDAP groups isn't supported even though there are configurations that may suggest otherwise.
• LDAPS:// is not checking for certificates. Without proper certs in place, it will revert to LDAP://.

Licensing

• Worker licenses are not displayed in the application interface after entry. Check the status of workers on the Workers page.
• Entering a license key in the incorrect location - e.g. a user license in the worker input - can cause unexpected issues with license validation and activation. Contact Support for assistance.

Microsoft .NET Core

• Microsoft .NET Core places extracted files for the runtime of the Alteryx Engine Worker in folder C:\Windows\Temp\.net\CutlassApi\. Disk cleanup utilities or antivirus programs could delete these files causing Alteryx workflow executions to fail. You might see the error message "Failed to retrieve asset." If this occurs, delete the C:\Windows\Temp\.net\CutlassApi\ directory and restart the AlteryxEngineWorker service. A workaround to prevent this problem is to set the Windows Environment variable DOTNET_BUNDLE_EXTRACT_BASE_DIR to the Analytics Hub installation folder (for example, C:\Program Files\Alteryx\Extracted_Runtime_Files\). After setting the environment variable, restart the AlteryxEngineWorker service for the setting to take effect. In a multi-node environment, make this change on all Analytics Hub machines. We're evaluating a permanent solution for this issue.

Overview Page

• Metrics displayed on the Overview page may not display correctly depending on actions taken on the platform.

Proxies

• Proxy environments aren't supported.

Reporting

• Some reports may not render as expected if generated from a run on Analytics Hub, specifically HTML output type.
• Insights are not supported.

Scheduling

• Whenever an output folder is removed, the schedule may fail without notification.

Settings

• A worker may not appear as active if the heartbeat setting is modified to be higher than 60 seconds.
• Changing the Workflow Logs folder may display an error in the application interface but logs will still be written to the chosen location.

Sharing

• A warning about user permissions is not displayed when sharing with the ‘All Users’ group.

Sites

• Site names cannot include an underscore (_).
• A site named ‘metrics’ will cause an issue due to a naming conflict with product functionality.

Special Characters and Encoding

• Characters other than numbers and English letters (for example, ~, _) may not display properly in the application interface or might cause issues. Examples:
  • Spaces in a file or schedule name may appear as %20.
  • Characters used in assets loaded to the data catalog may cause failures or issues navigating to the asset.
  • Search for a file with a name containing certain characters may return unexpected results.
• Metadata loaders for the data catalog fail if there are special characters (for example, @!") in the password for the connection.

User Management

• When selecting a large number of users in a dialog, it may not refresh with additional users until a search query is entered.
• ‘Remove Users’ and ‘Remove From Site’ options in the user table will only remove user roles, not group roles.
• A non-functional SMTP configuration can cause delays in user creation.
• Bulk removal of groups may not complete as expected.

Workflow Dependencies

• Some dependencies will not appear if they are in a macro.
• Some dependencies will not appear if the workflow is directly uploaded instead of saved from Designer.
• Some dependencies may not appear as expected when creating new workflow versions.

YXI Installer

• To avoid possible errors, run the install of YXI file using the Admin option.

Fixed Issues

Fixed Minor Release Version 2020.2.1
ID	Description	Version	Issue Status
DE25780	Account locking after failed attempts doesn't work.	2020.2	Fixed
DE26112	Cutlass (Alteryx Service) logs store passwords in plain text.	2020.2	Fixed
DE25853	Loaders fail on Analytics Hub configurations with multiple engine workers.	2020.2	Fixed