Talk to Experts Tuesday – Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows FAQ

[Jamie_Gregory]

This is the FAQ for the August 25th, 2020 session of Talk to Experts Tuesday - Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows. 

For the recording and transcript, please see TTET - Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows on August 25, 2020: Recording & Transcript.

Environment: Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows

I have set up a single node Qlik Sense Enterprise, have developed a Qlik App and published it on Stream. Ours is a startup, and its going to be just 3-4 business users who would be seeing the published app. How do I share the link of this stream published app on QMC to the business user? 

Go the app in the Hub, grab the link and share the link. If you’re only dealing with a single app you can give people a direct link to that application. Make sure that those users have licenses or that you’ve created a license assignment rule that will cover your users. If you’ve got a bigger system than it would be recommended to give people the link to the Hub and let them explore.

Can you share if there is a roadmap for bringing some of the new QS Cloud features to Enterprise on Windows, like Charts in the Hub.

Monitoring charts are a very specific example but we do definitely have a couple of features that we are shipping in a dedicated way to our SaaS platform. But what we are definitely working on and that’s one of our promises and where we invest, is to bring the Windows platform and the SaaS platform together and that is what we call multi-cloud. So yes, it can be the case that we have new features that we are shipping only to the SaaS world but we do invest quite a lot in the multi-cloud capabilities. It’s really all about trying to make this super easy to take an app from your Windows environment and distributing that to the SaaS world. And last but not least, because the cloud hub is capable of using links, you can even mix and match Qlik Sense apps on Windows together with apps on the cloud side. For the user, it’s very seamless because they won’t actually see a difference and that means the monitoring charts can show up on that Hub plus you can show apps being on the Windows platform.

If you go to Qlik Community > Support Knowledge > Qlik Support Updates Blog, every time there is a major release within Qlik Sense or any of our products, we do blog about it and call out those features. So if there is something you’re looking for, accessing one of those blogs would give you a way to know if that feature is available yet on Qlik Sense on Windows. You want to make sure you’re subscribed by clicking the Subscribe button.

There is also the Qlik Product Insights & Ideas. So this is where users can go ahead and enter your feature requests. So you click on Ideas and then it will take you to our Idea board where you can search for ideas. If you’re seeing something that is on SaaS and is not on Enterprise on Windows, you can definitely enter the idea in here. Then people like Thomas will go ahead and review that and see if it’s something could be eventually or is already on the roadmap to be entered into the product.

Are there any on demand online courses to learn advanced Qlik Sense administration, for example, the scale out from one node to multiple nodes?

We do have multiple training courses available. They are virtual on a scheduled basis so not on-demand. There is a Deploy and Administer Qlik Sense class. As far as scaling out, we have a Qlik Diagnostic Toolkit and there is also the Qlik Sense Admin Playbook, which is very helpful for going over a lot of different options within Qlik Sense and managing that environment and there’s videos. Which will be very helpful and potentially have some answers in regards to scaling up and installing and setting up. You always have the option to contact your Account Manager and work with our consulting team. They are a really great resource and they can definitely help you scale your system out if that’s what you’re looking for.

I have upgraded Qlik Sense and now my extensions are not working. Can you please help?

That often needs to be clarified as it is a surprisingly vague piece of information. Something could not be working in all sorts of ways. So for example, when you go navigate to an app, do the extension not load? Do they load very slowly? Do they load but then when you try and interact with them are they missing features? These are quite difference scenarios. So it’s really important to let us know a lot more than just “this doesn’t work”. When you raise a support case with us, the more information you can provide the better screenshots, timestamps, logs files.

So I know that there are different reasons why extensions can go away. So, for an example, there’s the extensions bundle that you can optionally install with Qlik Sense so if you move between an installation of Qlik Sense with the bundle and an installation of Qlik Sense without the bundle, a bunch of your extensions will disappear. Then there are other kind more specific issues that can occur with extensions, where you find that the extensions aren’t compatible with the new version of Qlik Sense. Or something’s gone wrong and your shared folder has been changes so they’re not where you thought they were.

Is it possible to move the "service cluster" folders from C: drive to another drive? Another drive has more free disk space.

Yes, this is possible. We have tools available within the installation of Qlik Sense that allows you to make changes to the service cluster location.  I have here a Qlik Sense environment where my service cluster is going to a C drive, just a shared path on my C drive. Say I wanted to change it to a different environment or different folder on a different drive, but for example I want to change it to this new shared folder. Go through the same process as creating a shared path during the install and share with the service account. Make sure you have the shared path then go to C:/Program Files/Qlik/Sense/ Repository/Util/QlikSenseUtil. Inside, we have a Qlik Sense utility and this is a tool that comes with the install and once you have it open, connect to the database. This is where you're going to be using the super user password that was used during the install of Qlik Sense. Once you're connected, click on Service Cluster > OK and this will tell you what your current shared path is. To update the path, copy the location of the new shared folder from Windows Explorer and replace the path in each directory. The connector folders are no longer used but do require an entry in the text box. Then click Save.

You will have to manually move any data from the old folder location, such as your apps, static content, etc to the new folder. The tool does not do that for you. If you don’t do that, when you attempt to go to the Hub and open up an application, it will say that app is not found. So after you manually move everything, restart the database service which will restart all of your Qlik Sense Services. Once it comes back up, you’ll be able to log into the QMC and then this shared path will be updated to the new shared path location.

For more information or to watch a video on this process, please see How to change the share path in Qlik Sense (Service Cluster).

A related question that often comes up is to do with moving the Program Data folder which is also located on the C drive. We do have an article on that as well - Change Installation Folder For Qlik Sense Enterprise - Change the PostgreSQL database folder.

Is there a plan to bring QlikView Access Point and Qlik Sense Hub together and/or the Qlik Management Consoles?

We do have the multi-cloud set up for QlikView as well. It’s possible since the April version to upload QlikView apps into the SaaS tenant. But there’s no plan to distribute a QlikView app into a Qlik Sense on Windows environments and same for the management console. So we do have the multi-cloud strategy for QlikView but that’s for the SaaS world and not the Windows world.

We do have a Talk to Experts Tuesday session coming up on September 22^nd for QlikView and Qlik Sense so that would be really great session to attend.

How do I create an Authentication Link to license Qlik Sense Desktop?

In the QMC, go to Virtual Proxies > Central proxy. Under the Client authentication link tab, enter in the authentication URL and the link friendly name. Click Generate. Provide the client authentication link to the user. They can then navigate to the URL, go to the three lines in the top right of the page and click Client Authentication. After clicking on the link, the user will have the option to open in Qlik Sense Desktop and the friendly name will now appear to select to authenticate. Please note the user does have to have an access token or professional license assigned.

For more information, please see Configuring Qlik Sense Desktop authentication link.

What is coming in Qlik Sense?

The upcoming release will be available in September. There are a few improvements for visualizations:

• Improved reference lines for bar and line charts
• Animator control improvements
• Number formatting of master measures
• Turn on and off borders in containers
• Custom sorting with the Sankey chart
• Frequency counts in the filter pain
• Ability to toggle the web map layer capacity and the hover

Multi-cloud improvements:

• App distribution status page in the QMC
• Whole multi-cloud setup console in the QMC (coming in November)
• Application management console (AMC) features

Other improvements:

• Support for NFS as a file share

I have a user that has rootadmin access but they can’t access anything in the Hub.

By default, administrative roles within Qlik Sense don’t get any special privileges in the Hub beyond the ability to see the Monitoring Apps. If you want your root administrator or any sort of administrative role to have extra privileges on the hub, you need to create those rules. But by default, the root admin gets access to everything in the QMC but cannot actually look inside every application and see users content.

One of the simplest ways to check the reason why you can’t do something on the Hub is actually a thing we colloquially refer to as the god rule. The rule with give access to everything, so if it still isn’t working, then the issue is not rule related.

When creating the rule, give the access to a specific user, select both in Hub and QMC for context, resource filter is star (*), and check every action box.  Then whatever action you’re taking, if it still does not work, it is not security rule related. If you can suddenly do whatever action it is you’re trying to do, then it is security rule related.

The reason why this method works is because security rules are additive in Qlik Sense. You cannot create a rule that takes away privileges. You can only create a rule that grants them.

Make sure you remove the rule once you’re done testing. Otherwise, you’ve just given a single user access to anything within Qlik Sense, which is not an ideal long term plan.

For more information on configuring the god rule, please see Guidance on how to conclude if the issue is Security Rule Related.

A good way to find out which security rules is related to the issue is to use the Audit function in the QMC. For example, if someone has access to an app they should have, change the target resource to App, narrow it down to that specific user by using the magnifying glass, and then you can change the environment to the Hub Only. Double click on the R and all the security rules will list that apply to that user and that application. You can easily disable the rule and it will change the color from green to yellow, which means that there is a rule but it’s been disabled.

The audit function is very good to help narrow down what rule is causing an issue or what rule needs to be modified.