Tag: butler

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Can’t find that Qlik Sense log file from last week?

Photo by wu yi on Unsplash

Butler 7.2 to the rescue!

Yep, a new version of your friendly Qlik Sense helper has been released.
Buter 7.2 adds a few really nice features:

  • Standalone, pre-built binaries for Windows, macOS and Linux. No more installing Node.js first – just download Butler and run. It’s now easier to get started with Butler than ever before!
  • Config file location and log level configurable via command line options. No more finding the config file, change log level, debug, change log level back. Time saver!
  • Save script logs of failed reload tasks in an easy to access location. Simplifies investigations around what caused reloads to fail!

If you are looking for getting-started instructions, reference docs, examples and more – that’s all available at Butler’s dedicated documentation site butler.ptarmiganlabs.com.

All releases are available on GitHub, there you also find forums for bug reports, discussion new features and more.

Continue reading “Can’t find that Qlik Sense log file from last week?”
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Butler Sheet Icons v2.1 is out

Happy unicorns! Free cake! 🦄🍰

…and a new version of everyone’s favourite tool for creating #Qlik Sense sheet icons.

Following up on last week’s release, version 2.1 is now out.

Largely based on feedback from the v2.0, the new version adds:

1️⃣ Exclude some sheets from getting new sheet thumbnail icons. An intro sheet in all apps that shouldn’t be touched? No problem!
2️⃣ New command to remove all sheet icons from one or many Sense apps. Can come in handy when you deal with large number of Sense apps in automated CI/CD pipelines etc.
3️⃣ Bug fixes and updated documentation.

Pre-built binaries for Windows and macOS available on GitHub: https://github.com/ptarmiganlabs/butler-sheet-icons/releases

Docker images on Docker Hub: https://hub.docker.com/r/ptarmiganlabs/butler-sheet-icons/tags

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How I learned to stop doing manual screen shots and love SenseOps automation

😖Let’s be honest now.

Does your 🧠 really enjoy the manual process of taking screenshots and processing 15 sheets each in 50 different apps?
And then keeping those sheet icons updated as the sheets are modified…?

Didn’t think so.
No-one likes that and the result is usually outdated sheet icons in your Sense apps.

⁉️You know what? There is a better solution.

Continue reading “How I learned to stop doing manual screen shots and love SenseOps automation”
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Butler 5.0 is out – Extra mega super deluxe reload alerts for Qlik Sense

…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:

  • Alerts for failed or aborted reloads can be sent to Slack, MS Teams, outgoing webhooks, MQTT or as email.
  • Alerts sent as email, Slack and MS Teams can all make use of all the rich formatting and layout options available on those platforms.
  • Alert emails can be sent to the owner of the Sense app that failed reloading.
  • A new API for doing partial (and full) app reloads was added. This means it’s now possible and even easy to do partial app reloads in Qlik Sense. One of the epic QlikView features finally become usable in Qlik Sense!

Interested in more details?
butler.ptarmiganlabs.com

Curious what the alerts look like in reality? Check out this video for a hands-on demo:

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Superpowers to Qlik Sense Enterprise: The Traefik reverse proxy, part 1

Edit: A GitHub repository has been created with the files mentioned in this article:
https://github.com/mountaindude/qlik-sense-and-traefik

What’s Traefik and how does it relate to Qlik Sense?

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”
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Black box monitoring of Butler tools – monitoring the monitor

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.

Health dashboard at Ptarmigan Labs, covering both servers, applications and data.
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Animated GIF horror for Qlik Sense

Parrot, anyone?

Qlik Sense is very much my go-to tool for many data related questions.
It’s very powerful to be able to throw together a proof of concept or test a hypothesis in half an hour.
Seeing is however believing, so those prototypes does need some polishing before they can be seen as production grade.

I have always pushed my peers in the Qlikosphere to become better at using icons for their Qlik Sense apps in general, and also for the sheets within those apps.
Having an icon for a sheet within an app makes it way easier for the user to find a particular sheet – humans are visual by nature.

Continue reading “Animated GIF horror for Qlik Sense”