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Customer Managed Telemetry Enterprise Utility

Overview

Customer Managed Telemetry (CMT) provides you the ability to track the workflows and tools in use throughout your organization. It requires setup on the machine that runs Designer to access the log files and telemetry data. This workflow gathers the necessary files and compiles them into easy-to-read visualizations in Tableau and PowerBI. You can customize the workflow to output in other formats if needed. Download the Workflow Migration Enterprise Utility from the Alteryx Marketplace.

Prerequisites

  • Enable the Customer Managed Telemetry feature. Go to the instructions.

  • PowerBI, Tableau, or other visualization software license. If you use Tableau, download and install the Tableau Output tool.

  • Download and Install the Customer Managed Telemetry Enterprise Utility workflow from Marketplace.

Configure

The Customer Managed Telemetry Enterprise Utility is designed as a plug-and-play solution, but it does require some simple configuration.

  • Input: Update the Directory Input tool to point to the location where your telemetry files are stored. This can be a local directory or a shared network drive.

  • Filter: You might also need to update the Filter tool in the yellow Comment tool. This Filter looks for telemetry files created within the last 45 days by default, but you can change that range.

  • Tableau Output: Connect the Tableau Output tool to your instance of Tableau.

  • PowerBI/Other: Update the Output tools to point to your desired file location. These tools are set up to write CSV files for PowerBI, but you can change the file type if you need a specific type for another visualization platform.

Process Overview

  1. Read in Telemetry files and filter by age. This step also checks to verify the XML formatting and correct it if needed for proper processing.

  2. Collect Telemetry Headers: Parse headers from telemetry files. This process occurs in 2 different containers—one pulls the Telemetry Header and the other the Document Header. This information is not used in the bulk of the workflow but is passed directly to the output step for the visualizations.

  3. Extract Tools from Containers: This section looks for tool information for tools that are nested up to 6 Tool Containers deep. All of the tool information is then combined and passed downstream for further processing.

  4. Extract Tool Details: This Tool Container has a few containers in it and parses the details of the tools within the workflow. The information parsed includes metainfo, tool GUI settings, property settings, configuration data, and connection details. This information is combined and passed on to the output section as well as the lineage section.

  5. Infer Basic Lineage: This process looks at the Input and Output tools within each telemetry file and prepares the lineage. The results are passed to the final output step.

  6. Export for Reporting: The final output process cleans up the data—it removes unnecessary columns and uses a Data Cleanse tool to remove any leading or trailing whitespace and replace nulls. The Tableau Output tool writes a hyper file for Tableau that contains all of the data from the workflow. Each set of data also writes to its own CSV file for use in other visualization platforms such as PowerBI. The final Output tool writes a YXDB file that contains some additional raw XML data that that you can further brake down if needed.