Qlik Audit API for Sheet Usage

[matthewharrison]

Our team was happy to see recently that Qlik exposed a new Audit API event to reflect user views of individual sheets.  This theoretically gives us the ability track the usage across all our reports to understand user adoption of our BI offerings.  Despite this, we are encountering several problems operationalizing this Audit API event to a useful level.  Our end goal is to have data in a form that lists how many times a sheet was viewed over a period of time along with related dimensions such as app, space, user name, and any other insightful info available. 

We experimented briefly with adapting the existing community monitoring apps to try and add this Audit event but have little experience with the level of scripting required.  The ideal solution would be a Qlik app like these monitoring apps that would allow us to pull data through a REST connection, store it in QVD form and then aggregate sheet usage events by user/app/timeframe/etc.  

We are also able to reach this info through the Qlik-CLI, but are apprehensive to start building infrastructure to automate and store this data without exploring other options.

Has anyone experimented with possible tools/Qlik apps/automations to leverage this new API event?  Does the Qlik product team have plans to release any native functionality to make this data more accessible?

Any input or suggestions are appreciated!

[marksouzacosta]

My two cents on this: I found this comment on LinkedIn this afternoon: "Sheet Usage tracking is coming soon to the Qlik Cloud Monitoring Apps".

Source:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:7208842826619518977?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acommen...

[DaveChannon]

I can confirm the plan is to add it to the app analyzer, keep an eye on https://github.com/qlik-oss/qlik-cloud-app-analyzer for new releases.

[matthewharrison]

This is promising, thank you!

[matthewharrison]

This is great to hear!  Out of curiosity, do you have a rough timeframe for when this might be implemented?  Our team actively has a need for this functionality so an estimate may help our planning.

[Daniel_Pilla]

Hey @matthewharrison ,

I have the application (App Analyzer) finished with this feature added and it is in beta testing right now. It will be released in early July, likely the week after the US holiday.

Cheers!

[Daniel_Pilla · Accepted solution]

Here is a preview of one of the sheets. Note there is no month over month data yet as the API event is new, so I am setting all of the session data to begin from June 1st and forward. Come July, you'll see the month over month metrics.

Remember that you can also set an alert on the App Analyzer so it will notify you when it is out of date by following this guide: https://community.qlik.com/t5/Official-Support-Articles/Qlik-Cloud-Monitoring-Apps-Workflow-Guide/ta...

Cheers!

[matthewharrison]

This is awesome!    I will also make sure to configure this automation.  Thank you so much Daniel!

[Daniel_Pilla]

@matthewharrison @marksouzacosta  - The new version of the App Analyzer is now live, FYI. You can learn more about how to install the Qlik Cloud Monitoring Apps here if unfamiliar: https://community.qlik.com/t5/Official-Support-Articles/Qlik-Cloud-Monitoring-Apps-Workflow-Guide/ta...

Cheers!

[matthewharrison]

@Daniel_Pilla Thank you for this!  We got the new version installed Friday afternoon and are very happy with this new functionality.  The one thing I had a question about was the lack of a "Sheet Name" field in the session details.  We can gather the statistics at the grain we need since there is a "sheet ID" column available, but knowing what sheet we are looking at without clicking through the link would be a game changer.  Do you have any suggestions for how we might get the sheet name pulled into the App Analyzer session details?