butler Archives - Ptarmigan Labs

2020-09-082020-09-09

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!

2020-07-262020-07-26

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.

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.

2020-01-102020-01-10

Animated GIF horror for Qlik Sense

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.

2019-04-142019-04-14

One click creation of Qlik Sense apps: Butler App Duplicator 3.0 is out

Heading for the mountains here, but a quick update first.

Everyone’s favourite app wizard for Qlik Sense (ok… my favourite wiz at least..) has had a major face lift – yay!

The basics are the same, i.e. one-click creation of Qlik Sense apps, using regular Sense apps as templates. Several new features however take the tool to a new level, making it easier to set up, manage and more enterprise grade. Good news thus!

2018-10-16

The beauty of Docker – how to run all Butler tools with a single command

Docker is great.

Docker is one of those tools that have the potential to fundamentally transform how you develop and run software – once you have tried Docker it is hard to imagine going back to something else.

In previous posts we have seen how Butler, Butler SOS and Butler CW can be run as Docker containers.
But we can do even better – why not control all the Butler tools from a single docker-compose file? Maybe even specifying the dependencies on influxdb and mqtt in there too?

Setting this up is incredibly easy – a single docker-compose file tells Docker what containers to use, and some config files tells the Butler tools where to find things.

Let’s get started!

Continue reading “The beauty of Docker – how to run all Butler tools with a single command”

2018-10-14

Docker everywhere – Qlik Sense operations monitor using Butler SOS

Following up on previous posts (here and here) about the Butler family of tools being Dockerized, here is another one on the same topic:

Butler SOS can now be run in a Docker container.

This is good news as it makes it a lot easier to set up real-time monitoring of a Qlik Sense enterprise environment, compared to the previous (still working, btw) method of installing Node.js and then running Butler SOS on top of Node.

The Github repository has all the details – head over there to get the latest release of the code as well as instructions how to run Butler SOS using Docker.

The Docker image is available on Docker Hub, if you want to get started right away.

2018-09-27

Butler Cache Warmer + Docker = True

More Docker in the Butler family!

Today version 2.0 of Butler CW was released, including a Docker image and configuration files needed to run Butler CW as a Docker container.

Feature wise the stand-alone Node.js app and the new container-based solution are identical, it’s just way more convenient to run it as a Docker container.

Additional info is available in the GitHub repository.

Yesterday the original Butler tool was Dockerized, today Butler CW… Do you see the trend?

Continue reading “Butler Cache Warmer + Docker = True”

2018-09-262018-09-26

Hey Butler, please meet Docker

Before the summer the Butler tool turned two years old – time flies!

Over those years I have installed, tweaked and upgraded a fair number of Butler instances… Not a problem per se, but maintaining a production grade Butler instance does assume a certain level of experience around Node.js, Linux, networking etc.

The most recent Butler version (v2.2) attempts to make it easier to deploy and operate Butler. This is achieved by deploying Butler as a Docker container instead of a regular Node.js app.

The Docker image (from which a container is created) contains exactly the same Node.js app that you can run right on your server or laptop – i.e. there is no functional difference what so ever between running the Node app natively, and running it as a Docker container.

There are some significant benefits of running Butler under Docker:

Continue reading “Hey Butler, please meet Docker”

2018-06-272018-06-27