User Sessions

Butler SOS can poll Qlik Sense servers to retrieve a snapshot of currently active user sessions.

This is different from User Events, which provides real-time notifications when sessions start and stop.

Polling vs Events

User Sessions = Periodic snapshots of who is connected right now
User Events = Real-time stream of session start/stop activity

For background on what sessions are and how they work, see Sessions & Connections.

What data is collected?

For each virtual proxy configured for monitoring, Butler SOS tracks:

• Total session count
• Per-user session information (optional)
• Session details including user directory and user ID

Configuration

User session monitoring is configured in two places in the config file:

1. General settings

Butler-SOS:
  userSessions:
    enableSessionExtract: true # Query unique user IDs with open sessions
    pollingInterval: 30000 # How often (ms) to poll session data
    excludeUser: # Optional blacklist of users to ignore
      - directory: LAB
        userId: testuser1

2. Per-server settings

For each monitored server, specify which virtual proxies to monitor:

Butler-SOS:
  serversToMonitor:
    servers:
      - host: sense1.company.com
        userSessions:
          enable: true
          host: sense1.company.com:4243
          virtualProxies:
            - virtualProxy: /
            - virtualProxy: /sales

Important

You need to configure both the general userSessions section AND the per-server userSessions settings to get user session data.

Use cases

Session data is valuable for:

• Capacity planning - Understanding peak usage times and user load
• License management - Tracking concurrent users
• Troubleshooting - Identifying which users had active sessions when issues occurred
• Server maintenance - Knowing which users will be affected by a server restart