Make it… Build it… Break it… Fix it…
In spite of Qlik Sense having great APIs, little has over the years been done around continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD) of Sense apps.
It’s not that CI/CD is a bad idea – rather the opposite. These days it’s probably the closest thing to a standard way-of-working there is.
Continue reading “CI/CD with Qlik Sense, GitHub Actions and self-hosted runners”
If you develop Qlik Sense applications you’ve been there: Manually creating screen shots and then manually uploading them to a content library, and finally manually assigning them as sheet icons.
Fun? Not really. But it makes the lives of our end users easier, so we do it.
I’ve had this idea for years, but only got around to work on it recently.
Better late then never, the Butler family of open source tools for Qlik Sense has a new member:
Butler Sheet Icons
https://github.com/ptarmiganlabs/butler-sheet-icons
It’s an open source tool that will take screen shots of all sheets in a Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows app, upload the images to a content library and finally set the sheet icons of each sheet. Automatically.
The tool is cross platform (Windows, MacOS, Linux, Docker).
A single command will update all sheets in an app. Add a few lines of PowerShell script and you can automatically update all sheets in all apps…
Or run it as a Docker container as part of your CI/CD workflow.
Or manually when you have made UI changes to your Sense app.
Feel free to try it out, feedback, report bugs or contribute with new features!
…and yes – Butler is still open source.
The step from 4.x to 5.0 indicates this is a major release.
Very much so in fact.
The main focus of the new version is on reload alerts. Rich email alerts were introduced in Butler 4.2, but that was really just the testing ground for what’s now available in 5.0.
Here’s the short version of what’s new:
Interested in more details?
butler.ptarmiganlabs.com
Curious what the alerts look like in reality? Check out this video for a hands-on demo:
After thinking about the concept for a few years and actively working on it for six months, it’s time for the first public release.
The Butler family of open source DevOps tools for Qlik Sense Enterprise has a new member: Butler Auth
Continue reading “Butler Auth 1.0 now available – strong authentication for Qlik Sense!”
Butler 4.2 brings alerting superpowers to Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows.
This version of Butler might actually bring you the most flexible and powerful alert emails ever for Qlik Sense.
Layout and contents of the emails are configurable, script logs included in the email and more.
Find all details at butler.ptarmiganlabs.com.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
Butler adds various features to Qlik Sense Enterprise (the Windows server version), making it easier to develop, maintain and operate Qlik Sense environments and apps.
Butler is open source software.
Full docs, getting started guide available at butler.ptarmiganlabs.com.
The Corona pandemic made lots of people start working from home and the importance of instant messaging apps has increased quite dramatically since.
As a result more people are logged into Slack, Microsoft Teams and similar tools. This is good as it opens up for using these tools as a communication channel also from Qlik Sense apps to end users.
In this post we’ll take a look at how messages can be sent from Sense load scripts to Microsoft Teams. The same concept can be applied also to Slack and other IM tools that support webhooks from external tools to the IM tool – usually called “incoming webhooks”.
Continue reading “Post messages to Microsoft Teams from Qlik Sense”
Security is important – period.
Usability of web based systems is off course important, but so is security. In the previous (first) article in this series we looked at how the Traefik reverse proxy can be used set up end user friendly URLs for Qlik Sense Enterprise (QSE) environments, while at the same time adding a layer of security by hiding the internal structure of the QSE cluster.
Today we’ll look at how you can get free SSL/TLS certificates from Let’s Encrypt and how these are used to provide https for QSE.
Article 1: Superpowers to Qlik Sense Enterprise: The Traefik reverse proxy, part 1
All code, scripts etc used in this article is available in the Part 2 folder in this GitHub repository.
Let’s go!
Continue reading “Superpowers to Qlik Sense Enterprise, part 2: Free https certificates from Let’s Encrypt”
Edit: A GitHub repository has been created with the files mentioned in this article:
https://github.com/mountaindude/qlik-sense-and-traefik
Traefik is one of today’s most hyped reverse proxies. It’s available in both a commercial and a (very capable!) open source version. According to the company behind Traefik it’s been downloaded more than 2 billion times – that’s a lot…
In this blog post we’ll take a look at how Traefik can run natively on Windows server, providing services to a Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows cluster.
We will see how this can make Qlik Sense easier to use for end users as well as easier to run and operate for sysadmins.
Specifically, we’ll use Traefik to set up TLS secured access (a.k.a. https) to Qlik Sense, while at the same time establishing a solid platform to which we can add more features in coming blog posts.
Starting with the basics makes sense though – let’s get to it!
Continue reading “Superpowers to Qlik Sense Enterprise: The Traefik reverse proxy, part 1”This is part 3 in a series about how healthchecks.io can be used to solve various kinds of monitoring scenarios for Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows (QSEoW) environments.
Previous articles:
Part 1: Oh data where art thou?
Part 2: Black box monitoring of Windows servers
Tl;dr
Most of the Butler family of DevOps tools for Qlik Sense can now be monitored using healthchecks.io or similar tool.
If one of the supported Butler tools go down, an alarm is raised and one or more alerts are sent via email, Slack, Teams, PagerDuty or other supported channels.
This means that both infrastructure (servers etc), applications/services and data sources can be monitored using the same tool and on the same dashboards.
