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
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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.
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.
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.
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.
1 - Windows
Running Butler SOS in Windows.
Installation
There are two options: Run Butler SOS as a standalone binary or as a Node.js app.
The first is by far easier to set up and maintain and thus recommended.
Using the pre-built, standalone app
The pre-build binaries are available from the releases page.
Download the Windows binary
“Unblock” the downloaded zip file
Right-click the zip file
Select “properties”
Mark the “Unblock” check box in the lower right part of the properties window
Click the “Apply” button, then “Ok” to close the properties window
Unzip the zip file
Move the extracted butler-sos.exe file to desired location, for example d:\tools\butler-sos
Use nssm or similar tool to install Butler SOS as a Windows service
Unblocking the Butler SOS zip file on Windows Server
Using Node.js
In this scenario you will use the Butler SOS source code together with the standard Node.js runtime libraries.
The result is the same as with the stand-alone binaries, you just have to do more of the work yourself.
This is usually not preferred, but if you want to add new features to (or modify existone ones) Butler SOS, this option is for you
2. Select a directory from which Butler SOS will be run
This can be pretty much anywhere, in this example d:\tools\butler-sos will be used.
3. Get Butler SOS
Get the desired Butler SOS version and extract it into the directory above.
Get the latest available version unless you have a really good reason to use an older version.
New features are added, bugs fixed and security updates are applied in each version - it’s simply a good idea to use the latest version.
Do not just clone the Butler SOS repository as that will give you the latest development version, which may not yet be fully tested and packaged.
The exception is of course if you want to contribute to Butler SOS development - then forking and cloning the repository is the right thing to do.
4. Install Node.js dependencies
From d:\tools\butler-sos\src, run npm i to install the various Node.js modules used by Butler SOS. Depending on your server configuration you may get some warnings about (for example) Python not being installed, these can usually be ignored.
Configuration
The configuration file is used the same way as when Butler SOS runs on Docker, with one exception:
The path to the certificates used to authenticate with Sense must be specified in the config file. With Docker the certificate path is always the same, but with Windows you need to specify where the certificate files are located.
For example, if the certificate files exported from Sense are stored in d:\secrets\sensecert, the config file would look like this when used on Windows:
...# Certificates to use when querying Sense for healthcheck data. Get these from the Certificate Export in QMC.cert:clientCert:d:\secrets\sensecert\client.pemclientCertKey:d:\secrets\sensecert\client_key.pemclientCertCA:d:\secrets\sensecert\root.pem
Stayin’ alive
A tool like Butler SOS should of course start automatically when the server it runs on is restarted. This can be achieved in at least a couple of ways:
By far the best option is to turn Butler SOS into a Windows service. That way it will be started on server boot, restarted if it fails etc. There are various tools for doing this, with NSSM being a very good one. Butler SOS has been installed in lots of Sense environments this way.
You can also use a Node process monitor such as PM2 to monitor the Butler SOS process, and restart it if it for some reason crashes. PM2 is not entirely easy to use on Windows though.
2 - Linux and Mac OS
Running Butler SOS in Linux and Mac OS. Installation and configuration.
Installation
There are two options: Run Butler SOS as a standalone binary or as a Node.js app.
The first is by far easier to set up and maintain and thus recommended.
Using the pre-built, standalone app
The pre-build binaries are available from the releases page.
Download the Linux/macOS binary
Move the extracted butler-sos file to desired location.
Use the process monitor of choice (see below) to make sure Butler SOS is always running
Using Node.js
This scenario is identical to the Windows scenario, please refer to that page for details. Keep in mind that the format of file systems paths differ between Windows and Linxu/Mac OS.
