Concepts

Deep dive into the various components that make up Butler.

Key-value store

Overview of the key-value database concept and how it is imlpemented in Butler.

Scheduler

The how and why of the Butler scheduler.

Reload alerts

Overview of the actions Butler can take when a reload task fails, is aborted or succeeds.

Note that client-managed and cloud versions of Qlik Sense

Successful reloads

Tracking successful reloads can be useful for various reasons, for example knowing how long different app reloads takes on average.

Starting Sense tasks in style

Starting Sense reload tasks (and other tasks) is usually done from the QMC.
Using Butler’s REST API it’s however very easy to start tasks from any third party system capable of making a REST call.

Incident management tools

There are various enterprise grade tools for handling IT incidents. Butler can integrate with such tools, for example forwarding information about failed reloads to an IT operations team.

Qlik Sense server version

Monitor Qlik Sense server version.

  • Check server version at regular, configurable intervals.
  • Store version info in InfluxDB, then visualize in Grafana.

Qlik Sense server license

Monitor and alert on expiring Qlik Sense server license.

  • Check server license status at regular, configurable intervals.

  • Store license status in InfluxDB, then visualize in Grafana. Or send licens status to webhooks or MQTT.

  • Alert via InfluxDB/Grafana, webhooks or MQTT when the license is about to expire.

Qlik Sense access licenses

Monitor and manage Qlik Sense end user access licenses.

  • High level metrics per user license type (professional, analyzer etc) are gathered and stored in your database of choice (at the time of writing, InfluxDB is supported).
  • User licenses can be released automatically after a certain period of inactivity, allowing them to be used by other users.

File system access: copy/move/delete files

Manipulating files from Sense load scripts in a secure yet flexible way.

MQTT integration

Details about how Qlik Sense can use Butler to send pub-sub messages using MQTT.

UDP client

A basic, stand-alone UDP client is included in Butler.

Monitor Windows services

Butler can monitor Windows services and send alerts if a service is not running.
Services on multiple servers can be monitored, and Butler can send alerts to destinations such as Slack, Teams, email, webhooks, InfluxDB, New Relic and MQTT.

Sending messages to MS Teams

MS Teams have moved away from simple webhooks to a concept called “workflows”, which are really MS Power Automate workflows.

This means that a Power Automate webhook is needed in order for Butler to send messages to Teams.

This page describes both how to create new channels in Teams and how to set up new webhooks that can be used to send messages to the new channel.

Using custom links in alerts

Email, Slack and MS Teams alert messages can include custom links to external systems.

This pages describes how to set this up.

Real-time metrics (deprecated)

Details about the real-time metrics (active user count etc) provided by Butler.

Last modified April 22, 2021: First commit (c105eb7c)