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After a few months of real-world testing I now feel confident sharing this with the wider community.
"Butler" (butler.ptarmiganlabs.com) is an open source toolbox aiming at making life easier for both Sense admins and developers. It offers a range of features including reload failure alerts, a cron based (and thus very flexible!) task scheduler, generic key-value store (can be used to create task chaining with parameter passing), MQTT pubsub support, sending Slack messages and more.
Butler as such is 4-5 years old by now, but the reload failure alert feature was added a few months ago and has now proven to be stable and very useful.
The idea is simple:
Admins and/or developers should be notified right away when a reload fails in Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows.
The notification should go out as a nice looking email, via Teams or Slack. Or all of them.
And most importantly: The notification should include enough information so that the admin or developer can right away get an idea of what caused the failure.
No more going to the QMC, download the script log of the failed task (if it's even available there any more!), find the end of that log and then see that someone had forgotten a single semicolon....
Butler does all of the above.
It also has a template engine that allows you to define what your own alert emails should look like, here's an example (from the Butler doc site )
A few things to note:
- The email isn't just a basic text email. It has formatting that makes it easy to read and digest.
- The email contains info about the task that failed, including what server it executed on, task name, associated app name, reload history etc.
- You get the last few lines of the script log right in the email. The number of lines that are included is easily configured in Butler's config file. You can also get the first few lines from the script log included in the email.
On mobile an alert email can look like below. Android home screen on the left and actual alert email on the right.
As mentioned, Butler is open source and free to use and modify.
Further information, getting-started instructions, examples etc are available at butler.ptarmiganlabs.com.
Enjoy!
Transparency/disclosure: I am the lead developer of this open source project.
