Windows
Running Butler SOS in Windows.
Native app
How to install Butler SOS as a Node.js application.
Selecting an OS
While Qlik Sense Enterprise is a Windows only system, Butler SOS should be able to run on any OS where Node.js is available.
Butler SOS has been succesfully used as a native Node.js app - during development and production - on Windows, Linux (Debian and Ubuntu tested) and mac OS.
Prerequisites
| What | Comment |
|---|---|
| Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows | Mandatory. Butler SOS is developed with Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows (QSEoW) in mind. Butler SOS is simply not intended to work with Sense Desktop or Sense cloud. |
| Node.js | Mandatory. Butler SOS is written in Node - which is thus a firm requirement. |
| MQTT broker | Optional. MQTT is used for outbound pub-sub messaging. Butler SOS assumes a working MQTT broker is available, the IP of which is defined in the Butler SOS config file. Mosquitto is a great open source broker. It requires very little hardware to run, even the smallest (usually free) Amazon/Google/Microsoft/… instance is enough, if you want a dedicated MQTT server. If you don’t care about the pubsub features of Butler SOS, you don’t need a MQTT broker. In this case you can disable the MQTT features in the config YAML file. |
| InfluxDB | Use at least one of InfluxDB and Prometheus. An open source database for realtime information, used to store metrics around Butler’s own memory usage over time (if this feature is enabled). At this point more metrics and events are sent to InfluxDB, compared to Prometheus. |
| Prometheus | Use at least one of InfluxDB and Prometheus. The de-facto standard open source tool for metrics gathering in large-scale systems, including Kubernetes. A bit more complex to set up and configure compared to InfluxDB, but also more focused on providing observability features. |
| Grafana | Optional. The de-facto open source standard for showing real-time metrics. In order to visualise Sense realtime metrics in Grafana you must enable at least one of InfluxDB or Prometheus. |