Setup

Which config file to use

Butler can use multiple config files. Here you learn to control which one is used by Butler.

Minimal configuration to start Butler

The provided sample config file is a good starting point for your own config file.
It contains the minimum settings needed to start Butler, but a few settings in it must be updated to match your environment.

Connecting to a Qlik Sense server

Details on how to configure the connection from Butler to Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows.

Connecting to Qlik Cloud

Details on how to configure the connection from Butler to Qlik Sense Cloud.

Configuring Butler's REST API

Butler’s REST API can be enabled/disabled in itself. If the API is enabled, individual API endpoints can then be enabled/disabled as needed. By only enabling the endpoints needed for your Qlik Sense environment, memory usage is minimised and security maximised.

Reload alerts

Butler handles reload alerts from both client-managed Qlik Sense and Qlik Sense Cloud.

The same kind of message templates are used, meaning that the look and feel of the alerts are the same regardless of where the alert originated.

This can be of particular interest for companies with a hybrid setup or that are in the process of migrating from client-managed to cloud-based Qlik Sense.

Getting the same kind of alerts from both environments can make it easier to understand what’s going on.

Reload script logs

Butler can detect, capture and store all script logs of reload tasks that failed.
This makes it much easier to find and analyse the script logs of faile reloads.

Works with both client-managed Qlik Sense and Qlik Sense Cloud.

Monitoring Windows services

Butler can monitor Windows services and alert if they are not running.

This is useful for monitoring services that are critical for Qlik Sense to function - or any other important service.

Messages can be sent when services stop or start, with message destinations such as Slack, Teams, email, New Relic, InfluxDB, webhooks and MQTT.

Qlik Sense server version

Butler can monitor the server version of the client-managed Qlik Sense environment that Butler is configured to connect to.

• Check server version at regular intervals.
• Save version to InfluxDB.
• Makes it easy to keep track of versions running on different Qlik Sense environments, for example PROD, TEST and DEV.

Qlik Sense server license

Butler can monitor the Qlik Sense server license that is used to run client-managed Qlik Sense (=Qlik Sense Enterrise on Windows).

• Check license expiration date and alert a configurable number of days before expiration.
• Send license status and expiration alerts to InfluxDB, webhooks and MQTT.

Qlik Sense access licenses

Butler can monitor Qlik Sense 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.

Configuring the Butler scheduler

Butler’s scheduler complements the Qlik Sense built-in scheduler with more flexible triggers and a devops friendly API/file format for storing scheduling data.

Configuring the key-value store

Butler contains a key-value store that is accessible via the REST API.

Configuring file system access via REST API

Butler contains REST API endpoints for moving, copying and deleting files.

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.

Below you find instuctions for configuring the currently supported incident management tools.

Setting up MQTT messaging

Butler can use MQTT as a channel for pub-sub style M2M (machine to machine) messages. This page describes how to configure MQTT in Butler.

Configuring Butler heartbeats

Heartbeats provide a way to monitor that Butler is running and working as intended.
Butler can send periodic heartbeat messages to a monitoring tool, which can then alert if Butler hasn’t checked in as expected.

Configuring Butler metrics & monitoring

Butler can optionally log to the console and its logfiles how long it’s been running and how much memory it uses.

Optionally the memory usage can also be stored to an external database for later viewing/alerting in for example a Grafana dashboard.
InfluxDB and New Relic are currently supported targets.

Docker healthcheck

Docker has a concept of “health checks”, which is a way for Docker containers to tell the Docker runtime engine that the container is alive and well.

Butler can be configured to send such health check messages to Docker.

Creating Sense data connections

If you intend to call Butler’s REST API from the load script of Sense apps, you must create a few data connections first. A couple of them are mandatory, one is optional.

Control which tasks can be started via Butler's API

Qlik Sense tasks can be started using Butler’s REST API.
Using the task filtering feature it’s possible to control which tasks can be started.

This can be useful for sysadmins when only a limited set of tasks should be available to third party systems.

Configuring telemetry

Visualise Butler's config file

Forwarding user activity events to Butler

Butler can receive and act on any user event detected in the Sense log files. This page describes how to set this up using Sense log appenders.