About Butler SOS

Qlik Sense + DevOps = SenseOps

Anyone responsible for an IT system - large or small - can testify how frustrating it can be, NOT to be confident about the system’s current status.

Butler SOS was born out of that frustration.

As a sysadmin, shouldn’t you be the first to know when something breaks - rather than be told about it by stressed-out end users?

Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows (QSEoW)] is an awesome analytics platform.

In addition to being powerful - yet easy to use for end users - it also provides great APIs that make it possible to create all kinds of add-on tools that solve specific challenges.

Butler SOS is such a tool, aiming to provide best-in-class operational monitoring of Qlik Sense environments.

Butler SOS extracts more than 30 metrics on both server health (CPU load, free memory) and Qlik Sense specifics (session, users, log entries, cache status etc).

These metrics are stored in a time-series database (InfluxDB and Prometheus both supported) and optionally also sent to other services such as New Relic, or sent as MQTT messages.

Once the metrics are stored in the database/service of choice, Grafana or New Relic (if data is stored there) can be used to create real-time visualisations and alerts.

Scalability?

Butler SOS handles very large Sense clusters - or just a single node.

Alerts and notifications?

Built into Grafana. Email, Slack, Teams, New Relic, PagerDuty and more.
Prometheus offers even more integrations with various alerting tools.

Who, when, where?

Detailed info is available about what users are (and were!) connected to which virtual proxies.

Example: Easy to see which users will be affectd by a server restart. Connect this data to your IM tool and notify users before restarts happen.

Logging revisited

The Sense log database is gone as of second half of 2021, but with log events forwarded to Butler SOS - then visualised in Grafana or New Relic - you get real-time insight into errors and warnings as they happen.

No more digging around in log files on the server!