How to get failure notification for Qlik Sense applications

[RickyK]

Hi All,

Greetings!!

We have received a query from one of the user that, they wanted to get the notification/mail alert whenever the Qlik sense job gets failed ( due to some network issues, script error etc..) they need to get the alerts.

Can you please let me know how to achieve this?

Thanks in advance!

Regards,

RickyK

[mountaindude · Accepted solution]

Are you using client-managed Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows or Qlik Cloud?

If the former you have a few options, unfortunately there is no good built-in feature for this in client-managed Qlik Sense though.

Options include (in order of nice-ness of the alerts you get).

1.  Set up Log4net Xml appenders that send alert emails with very basic formatting and contents when reloads fail. Described in various places in this forum as well as here.
   1. Pros: Requires the least work
   2. Cons: You are limited to emails and those emails won't tell you much except that something failed.
2. Create your own monitoring solution based on Sense itself, i.e. create a Sense app that scans the Sense logs in retrospect for failed reloads and then takes action. 
    This seems to be a rather common solution but comes with its own set of challenges and issues.
   1. Pros: No need for any XML appenders or extra software to be installed.
   2. Cons: You don't get real-time alerts when a reload fails. Also, you use precious Sense engine reload slots to reload the monitoring app itself, to some degree preventing other/business-related to reload more frequently. You also get very limited alerting options - it's not easy to send messages to external tools from the Sense load script.  
3. Set up a proper monitoring tool such as the open source tool "Butler" (butler.ptarmiganlabs.com).
   It detects failed and aborted reloads and can alert to email, Teams, Slack and other destinations.
   More info here. A sample Butler email alert follows below.
   
   1. Pros: Gives you way more flexibility and control over when alerts are created (for which reload tasks etc), what the alerts look like, to whom they are sent (can be configured per task) and what they look like.
   2. Cons: You need to deploy and configure Butler. Not as hard as it sounds, given the provided template config file you can get started pretty quickly.

Question around Butler are best asked in the GitHub discussion forum.

Sample alert email created by Butler:

Humble disclaimer: I am the creator of the Butler tool and as such I am biased.
But I have yet to find some other solution that provides the same level of flexibility when it comes to alert destinations, customisation of the alert messages, real-time delivery of alerts etc.
Your specific needs should of course ultimately decide what kind of solution to use.