Make it… Build it… Break it… Fix it…
Qlik’s annual Qonnections conference in Orlando wrapped up yesterday.
Three days packed with the latest from both the Qlikosphere in general and Qlik in particular.
I had more session conflicts (where I wanted to attend several interesting sessions at the same time) than during any previous year, which is a sign of interesting topics, hopefully also of high quality sessions.
They say looks isn’t everything, it’s the inside that counts.
Certainly true, but when it comes to web apps – including Qlik Sense apps – looks is important.
Let’s check – which of these apps would you rather use?
I recently did an interview with the great people at the Qlik Branch blog, the post is now live over at their blog.
Nothing new or revolutionary – just a few nuggets of info about who I am 🙂
Have a great weekend everyone!
Göran
This one is long overdue, but finally here: Butler SOS v2.0
The new version is an almost complete re-write of v1.0. Changes are plentiful and include
The readme file on GitHub has all the details, here are some screen shots to get you started though:
The new version is available on GitHub.
PS. This is blog post # 100. Yaaay!!!
A freebie for the weekend:
Looks like Google is now offering a free ODBC driver for BigQuery.
Google has licensed Simba’s driver, which is great! The Simba driver has proven very stable and performant, and being able to use it freely to access data in BigQuery is likely to benefit BigQuery adoption.
The Simba drivers support both Standard and Legacy SQL modes in BigQuery, as well as large result sets, and are confirmed to be working very nicely with Qlik Sense September 2017 version.
There are versions available for 32/64 bit Windows, OS X, and 32/64 bit Linux.
I recently had a need for an isolated Qlik Sense environment, in order to test some of the new features of Qlik Sense September 2017.
While it works perfectly fine to run Sense with self-signed certificates, you then get browser warnings that the certificates are not valid etc. That might be fine, but as the test at hand involved testing my app duplicator service for Qlik Sense (which require a proper SSL cert) together with the September 2017 version of Sense, I needed a proper SSL certificate.
As I have good experiences using the free certificates of Let’s Encrypt (they secure this blog, for example) I thought it would be a good exercise figuring out how to use them together with Qlik Sense Enterprise.
The notes below are largely reminders-to-self, in case I need to do this again some day. Maybe they can also be useful for others out there.
Continue reading “How to set up free SSL certificates for Qlik Sense”
When relying on various Node.js services (e.g. Butler SOS, Butler, App Duplicator etc), you quickly run into the challenge to ensure all services are always up and running.
A failing service might be fine, as long as it is quickly restarted in a predictable way.
A concrete example could be Qlik Sense or QlikView apps that send status messages to Slack during the execution of their reload scripts. Those messages will fail if Butler is for some reason not running.
This leads us to the conclusion that the services must automatically be
a) started when a server is rebooted, and
b) restarted if they for some reason terminate/die.
Enter process monitors.
At their core, process monitors ensure that the desired processes are always running, i.e. bullet b) above. Some process monitors also offer additional features such as zero-downtime restart of services, memory and performance profiling of the monitored services, being able to monitor different kinds of processes (not only Node.js ditto).
Adding to the pain is the fact that Sense and QlikView runs on Windows servers, meaning that all those great tools available on Linux cannot be used.
Looking at Node.js specifially, I have found two process monitors to work well on Windows: Forever and PM2.
Continue reading “Monitoring and auto-starting Node.js services on Windows Server”
On the surface everything looks the same.
Under the hood everything has changed.
The 2.0 release of the Qlik Sense app duplicator is a major update. Most code has been refactored.
The most notable changes are:
Edit:
Qlik has made available a video from Anthony Deighton’s (Qlik’s CTO) keynote session.
Very much worth looking through the entire video – it was very interesting indeed.
His highlight of customer and partner project’s is found 12 min 36 sec into the video.
A few weeks back something cool happened.
During the big, main stage keynote session at Qlik‘s annual Qonnections conference, my Butler SOS project was highlighted as an example of a great application built on top of the Sense APIs.
I have to admit that it is pretty neat to get that kind of recognition from industry peers… a bit of ego boost :).
And it makes it easier and even more fun to work out coming, similar concepts and services. Lots more to be done around DevOps and Qlik Sense.
Speaking of which:
I started playing around with Qlik’s new Enigma.js library a week or so ago, to see if it could be used in coming projects.
Very nice indeed. Nothing wrong with good old Qsocks, but Enigma is a step in the right direction. Just like qsocks, Enigma is open source – but also fully supported by Qlik. That is a huge advantage!
I was recently in Helsinki, giving a talk at a QlikDevGroup event. Great event, great crowd. The topic was SenseOps and Butler SOS, and I showcased the lamp above as an example of a funky, but still relevant way to monitor user activity in a Qlik Sense Enterprise environment.
A person in the audience asked how the map works. I claimed it was super simple, costing less than USD 10 to build (assuming you already have a suitable enclosure) and uses just four wires hooked up between some pre-made modules. Time to prove it.
The four wires part might have been a slight exaggeration… but it depends on which wires you count – right?