Butler SOS

The Butler SOS project is about adding best-in-class monitoring to the client-managed Windows version of Qlik Sense Enterprise, also known as QSEoW (Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows).

The goal is to provide a close to real-time view into what’s happening in a Qlik Sense environment.

At different times different metrics will be of interest.
For that reason Butler SOS stores all metrics from Sense in a time-series databse (InfluxDB and Prometheus both supported), from which dashboards, reports etc can then be created using tools such as Grafana.
Grafana is an open source, world-class visualisation tool for time series data. It also has great alerting features and integrate with all kinds of alerting solutions and IM tools.

If you don’t fancy InfluxDB or Prometheus, Qlik Sense metrics and events can also be sent to New Relic for storage and visualisation.
They offer a free tier that will go a long way towards testing out a cloud-based visualisation solution for Butler SOS.

Metrics are a major component of operational monitoring, but it’s also important to keep on top of what errors and warning occur in the system.
As of late 2021 the log database is no longer part of QSEoW, with the log files the only place where you can find those errors and warnings.

Butler SOS address this by sending log events in real-time from QSEoW to Butler SOS, which then stores them in InfluxDB, and/or send them to New Relic, and/or re-publish them as MQTT messages.
This basically means you will very rarely have to plow through endless log files to find information about warnings and errors that have occured.

There is also a clear goal that Butler SOS should be very configurable.
In practice this means that features can be turned on/off as needed, improving security and lowering memory usage.

Butler SOS is written in Node.js and runs on most modern operating systems.
Stand-alone binary files are created for Windows, Linux and macOS.

You can run Butler SOS on the same server as Qlik Sense, in a Docker container on a Linux server, in Kubernetes, on Mac OS, on Raspberry Pi (not a good idea.. but possible and proven to work).

Butler SOS is a member of a group of tools collectively referred to as the “Butler family”, more info is available here.