butler-sos

Butler SOS: real-time server stats for Qlik Sense

I got somewhat distracted from the idea of breaking up the existing Butler software into smaller, stand-alone micro services. Or rather, an idea came to mind. An idea too good not to explore… The healthcheck API of Qlik Sense provides basic metrics for both the Qlik Sense engine itself, and

butler

Butler-MQTT and a realtime reload dashboard for Sense

Teaser video: Realtime reload dashboard Just to get your interest – this video shows what Butler-MQTT can be used for. All the pieces are included in the Github repo. The concept of a reload dashboard can be very useful if you have long running (hours!) reloads. Instead of relying on Sense’

qliksense

Icons for Qlik Sense apps

Developing apps on Qlik Sense is lots of fun, but also poses some challenges. The look and feel of your Sense apps is really important when it comes to end users’ first impressions of Sense. Digging deeper into the possibilities of Sense, extensions are an interesting way to enhance the

butler

Sense + DevOps = SenseOps

For some time I have been thinking about how to improve the Sense development process as a whole. There is a lot of gathered experience and best practices from the wider software development community, but how can we apply this to Qlik Sense development? Some initiatives are starting to appear.

qliksense

Setting up priority reloads in Qlik Sense

In a large Qlik Sense installations you are likely faced with a high number of reloads every hour. But some apps are more important than others – those apps should reload immediately when triggered. The alternative is that those important apps end up being queued after ongoing long running tasks – not

qlik luminary

Qlik Luminaries 2017 announced - yay!

And guess what? I am one of them! 🙂 I value this quite high. Being part of the 2016 Luminary program too, I know how much value it brought both in terms of great networking opportunities with fellow Luminaries (and others), as well as more and closer contacts with Qlik themselves.

butler-app-duplicator

Qlik Sense app duplicator 1.2: User interface included

For a long time I wanted to learn more about client side development. Javascript, CSS, reactive frameworks etc – all those concepts that make today’s web sites tick. I really think backend developers can benefit from having at least a basic understanding of how the front-end works – this will make

butler-app-duplicator

New version of App Duplicator for Qlik Sense released

A quick note before the weekend: Version 1.1.0 of the app duplicator for Qlik Sense was just release on GitHub, feel free to check it out. Main features of the new version are * https is now mandatory * Logging all requests to files on disk * Improved stability and better

butler-app-duplicator

App duplicator service for Qlik Sense

I worked on a small node.js server during the past couple of weeks. The idea came from the fact that 1. I over and over again find myself creating Sense apps that are almost identical, and 2. people starting out as Sense developers spend too much time learning the

homelab

Moving and extending VirtualBox virtual machines

Running things on Apple hardware here, all those Windows-only software packages are a somewhat of a pain… As good as they are, both Qlik Sense, some of the vendor specific embedded software IDEs and other need-to-have software are Windows-only. VirtualBox to the rescue. It is free and works really well

qliksense

The beauty of script autocompletion in Qlik Sense

Such a simple thing – but oh how useful. One of the recent versions (3.0? 3.1? 3.1.1?) of Sense added much improved syntax color coding of the load scripts, as well as autocompletion of function names, field names, variables etc. What might seem like a small change

butler

Butler for Qlik Sense version 2.0

A summer project is over, and Butler  has been released in a version that is a total rewrite of Butler version 1.x. Butler 2.0 includes features such as * Real-time monitoring of what users are active on a Sense Enterprise system * Real-time monitoring of failed reload tasks, with notifications

qliksense

Qlik Sense data model of the year

Long overdue, but during last few months I have finally started to play around with the various APIs available on the Qlik Sense platform. It has been said before, but it is worth repeating: those APIs are really, really powerful. They are one of the main reasons why I think

qliksense

Qlik Sense REST connector log file overload

I recently investigated a strange behaviour of the Qlik Sense REST connector, where it would become slower and slower executing REST queries, the longer the server had been running. RAM or CPU consumption was not unusually high, but something was clearly eating away some kind of resources from the system.

butler

Butler for Qlik Sense - connecting Sense to the world

The goal of the previously described Slack proxy project was to allow posting of messages from Qlik Sense load scripts to Slack (great instant messaging platform!). The project has however developed into something larger and slightly more ambitious, integrating other connections than Slack. The original project name “Slack proxy” has

electronics

ESP8266 Over The Air updating - what are the options?

Over the air convenience A real pain point when developing sensor nodes that are scattered around a building (or a country or the world!) is the updating part. How do you get new firmware onto the devices? The cell phone manufacturers were early to investigate the options, but from my

electronics

Microscope software for OSX

Got myself an Andonstar 2 megapixel USB microscope about a year ago, mainly just for testing it out, and having it readily available when some repair project demanded it. The microscope is actually pretty nice given its ca USD 60 price point, with decent picture quality, a sturdy stand (even

qlikview

URL encoding in Qlik Sense and QlikView

With so much cool data available online, tools like QlikView and Sense becomes real Swiss Army knives of data integration. Pull in some data from company internal databases, some data from previously created QVDs, and more and more commonly also from various online sources, both public and private. Depending on

qlikview

Posting to Slack - and more - from Qlik Sense load scripts (part 3)

Quick update to the previous post on this topic. There is a new version of slack_proxy available on GitHub. It adds a new endpoint for creating directories on the server where slack_proxy is running. This obviously means that the apps name – “slack_proxy” – is not really that relevant

qlikview

Generating test data for QlikView and Qlik Sense

Real data and test data – both are needed One of the great things about both QlikView (QV) and Qlik Sense is their integrations with other systems. Given the native connectivity to any ODBC source, web pages in general, Salesforce, REST APIs, BigQuery etc – combined with the dozens of connectors provided

qliksense

Posting to Slack from Qlik Sense load scripts - web service style (part 2)

As the first version of the Sense-to-Slack integration required you to lower the Sense security level, it is probably not a good option for enterprise Sense users, for example. Instead, let’s set up a small node.js web service, which exposes an API that we can call just like

qliksense

Posting to Slack from Qlik Sense load scripts, part 1

When thinking about it, it’s kind of strange that Slack has been so enormously successful. Sure, it’s a great instant messaging tool, but it’s not a new concept – IM tools have been around for decades, and IRC, Google chat and others rose to be very dominant and

electronics

FLIR TG165 unboxing

Got myself a new toy a while ago – A FLIR TG165 infrared camera. These devices used to cost thousands of Euros/Dollars, but during the past year the have come down in price a lot. I got mine from SOS electronic, think they had a campaign on it back when

electronics

Fixing a broken BK Precision 879b LCR meter

Some time ago I got what I thought was a score on Ebay – a really nice LCR meter at a very good price. Ok, it was broken, but the error message indicated it was just the fuse that was gone.  Looked like on the right. According to BK’s help

qliksense

Qlik Sense servers need time server connectivity to stay in sync

Probably pretty obvious when thinking about it in retrospect, but this one hit us the other week. After setting up some Qlik Sense servers without any real issues (rather the opposite – it is incredibly quick and easy to deploy an Enterprise scale Sense system!), one day one of the rim