Butler SOS is an open source (free!!) tool that provides real-time monitoring of Qlik Sense environments.
Runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS, in Docker or as a Kubernetes service.
Eager to try it out? The getting started pages will tell you everything you need.
— Why is monitoring important? —
Good question!
For starters, if you are responsible for a Sense environment and hear about issues from your end users - that’s a bad position to be in. You should be the first to know when something breaks. Only then are you able to fix things quickly, ideally even before end users realise there has been an incident.
Additionally, having access to real-time metrics makes it hugely easier to incrementally tweak and tune your Sense environment.
— Can I get alerts when some metric go out of bounds? —
Yes! Butler SOS stores all data in an InfluxDB and/or Prometheus database, from where it is visualised using Grafana.
Both are best-in-class, open source products for storing and visualising time-series data.
Grafana is increadibly feature rich, including a powerful alerting feature that can send alerts to email, IM tools (Slack etc), PagerDuty and more.
— Can I get alerts when errors or warnings occur in Qlik Sense? —
Yes! In version 7 Butler SOS added a new, unique feature: Real-time monitoring of Qlik Sense log events.
This means that you get notifications about warnings or errors within seconds of them happening in your Sense server(s). You can take action within minutes rather than hours or days.
The same concept also works for user events. Need to track sessions over time or alert when a users from a certain department logs on? No problem.
Butler SOS version 9 takes this concept even further, enabling forwarding of select log and user events to the New Relic monitoring service.
— What operating systems and browsers are used to access my Qlik Sense environment ? —
Glad you asked!
Butler SOS can help you with that too.
Butler SOS version 9.7 added a new feature that tracks user agents of all users
accessing your Sense environment.
This data is stored in InfluxDB, NewRelic and is sent as MQTT messages.
— We use system <our-preferred-monitoring–tool> for monitoring. Can it be used with Butler SOS? —
Yes, most likely. Butler SOS supports both InfluxDB, Prometheus and New Relic, but also optionally sends metrics as MQTT messages.
If your main monitoring tool can use either of these as a data source, it can read data extracted by Butler SOS.
If not natively supporting InfluxDB, Prometheus, New Relic or MQTT, it is usually pretty easy to create a small tool that acts as a bridge to other systems.
Latest release: 9.10
OS and browser tracking for all users accessing Sense,
saving the data to InfluxDB and NewRelic, and sending it as MQTT messages.
With the data in InfluxDB it’s then easy to visualise it in Grafana.
Available on GitHub.
Contributions welcome!
We use a Pull Request contributions workflow on GitHub.
New developers are always welcome!