Alteryx Designer desktop users, we have great news for you! We are thrilled to introduce the release of new orchestration capabilities for Designer desktop workflows, enabling the seamless orchestration of both on-premises and cloud-native workflows. This is a unique opportunity for Alteryx customers to run on-premises workflows alongside their cloud brethren, creating one unified way to orchestrate across on-premises and cloud-native environments

Earlier this year, we introduced Cloud Execution for Desktop to enable you to augment and extend your desktop workflows with the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform (AACP). With this latest enhancement to the Plans capability in the AACP, platform users can now orchestrate multiple desktop workflows that have been saved to the AACP and enabled with Cloud Execution. Platform users can also orchestrate desktop workflows with one or more cloud jobs into a single orchestration logic!

What is Plans?

Have you ever wanted to have one workflow run automatically based on an upstream process or event, such as an update to a folder in an S3 bucket? Or have you ever wanted to send a Slack notification when a workflow runs successfully or if it fails?  Or perhaps you’ve wanted to update a report built with the reporting capabilities in AACP with fresh data that is prepared in Designer desktop?

Plans is an AACP orchestration capability that allows Platform users to run multiple tasks sequentially or in parallel, define execution rules based on the execution status of the upstream tasks, use metadata of one task in another task, call API endpoints, send notifications, and more.

More details about Plans can be found in our help documentation.

How does the integration work?

To use the new integration between Designer Desktop workflows and Plans, customers must enable Cloud Execution for Desktop and have one or multiple desktop workflows in the Library for orchestration. Once these prerequisites are met, customers can go to AACP Plans, either from the AACP Landing page or the App Switcher menu, to create a new Plan.

In the Plan, customers can drag and drop the desktop workflow onto the main canvas and then select one of the Cloud Execution for Desktop workflows.

Customers can add another desktop workflow or any other task for orchestration. Tasks can be executed independently (in parallel) if no connection between tasks is created or sequentially. To define the execution connection rule, customers can either drop the second task next to the desired upstream task or manually create one of three connections by simply clicking on the output anchors ✓ (Success), > (Always), or X (Failure) and dragging a line to the input anchor of the downstream task.

Customers have the flexibility to add any number of desktop workflows as well as any other tasks from the left side panel. The available tasks include Designer Cloud workflows, Reporting, Machine Learning, HTTP (API call), and Slack notifications.

Once the Plan is configured and all tasks are added, customers can execute it by clicking the “Run” button or scheduling its execution. This will bring customers to the runtime view of the Plan, where they can see the live status of each task execution and download the desktop workflow output file from the Output tab.

Next Steps

This integration of Designer desktop workflows with the AACP Plans marks an exciting development for our desktop users. With the ability to orchestrate multiple desktop workflows alongside other AACP applications, users gain new levels of flexibility, efficiency, and productivity.

As Alteryx continues to evolve and expand its capabilities, we encourage you to explore the possibilities of this integration, stay updated with Release Notes, and take advantage of our free trial to experience these enhancements firsthand. Your feedback and insights on the Maveryx Community Discussion Forums are invaluable in helping us refine and enhance our offerings.

We look forward to your active participation in this exciting journey of innovation and growth.