Qlik Sense - QMC Utilities

[Michael_Tarallo]

Today - Jeff Goldberg is back as our latest guest blogger and will introduce us to Qlik Sense QMC Utilities. Jeff is a Senior Enterprise Architect on the North America Enterprise Architecture team who has worked in various technology positions for over 16 years. Jeff focuses on integration, deployment, automation, security, and api topics across a wide range of software. Thanks for this valuable contribution Jeff!

Good day Qlik Community!  Recently you may have seen this logo popping up on Qlik Community, Qlik Branch, or on the Visualize Your World tour. It represents our add-on capabilities that support our initiatives to provide Governed Self-Service and Power tools for Qlik Sense, created by the North America Enterprise Architecture team. Today, the EA PowerTools team would like to introduce you to their latest release known as QMC Utilities.

QMC Utilities

QMC Utilities is a collection of tools using the Qlik Sense APIs to automate and streamline a variety of processes within the management and administrative areas of Qlik Sense.  In the initial release, the team released three helpful tools to make configuring and administering a Qlik Sense deployment easier.

• Sheet Approver:  Currently, the process to take a published sheet in an app and make it a base sheet requires a few steps which include duplication and app ownership changes. The Sheet Approver enables application owners to search through the community sheets in a Qlik Sense application and promote them to base sheets in as little as two clicks. The Sheet Approver is a great solution for scenarios where multiple app designers need to make new sheets for existing applications.  Now, app designers can create sheets in their “my work” area at the same time, publish them to the community, and the application owner can approve the sheet for inclusion in the core app.

Custom Property Bulk Loader:  One of the unsung capabilities in Qlik Sense is the ability to add custom attributes to resources within Qlik Sense.  These custom properties help in numerous ways to manage a Qlik Sense environment, from providing local group type attributes, to users, to creating dynamic security rules that have broad applicability and reduce the risk of “rule creep”. Unfortunately, adding custom property values can take some time as it requires key entry. The Custom Property Bulk Loader solves this problem by enabling administrators to load a list of values into an existing or new custom property for Qlik Sense.

Rule Manager: The Rule Manager makes it easy to export and import rules from one Qlik Sense site to another.  Rules are selected from the list, exported to json with all the necessary information to import the same rule into another environment.

Want to download this great set of tools and learn more?  Head over to the EA Powertools community page to download this solution and have a look at the other great things this team is building to enhance Qlik Sense!

Regards,

Jeff Goldberg

Follow me: Jeff Goldberg (@goldbergjeffrey) | Twitter

[rwunderlich]

Hi Jeff, Really great stuff that I'm sure will be useful to many. I'm impressed with what you are putting out in the EA Power Tools. I think the Governed Metrics Service is a great idea and something that most medium to large customers will need.

I do have an unease about recommending these tools, such as GMS, to customers. The tools can become a critical part of day-to-day production operations. If a tool failed, it could have a serious impact on the customer operation. Since these are unsupported tools, the level of support or time to fix is indeterminable.

My impression is that EA Power Tools, like the QV Power Tools, are coming from the initiative of a small group of talented employees. If those people leave or are unavailable, there is no institutional commitment from Qlik to continue development, release compatibility or support.  I'm currently hearing frustration from customers about several of the QV Power Tools no longer working with QV12.

Is there any potential for these tools to be adopted into the product and becoming supported features?

[Anonymous]

exactly! this was my question when I saw this awesomeness

[#4]

Agree 100% with Rob here (as is the case pretty much 100% of the time! ).

[#5]

Hello!

Same here!

I already have another example: The popular Extension qsVariable (Qlik Branch) was developed by employee Erik Wetterberg who left Qlik this summer.

The qsVariable extension is not very complex, so one can fix it by looking at the code. But Goverened Metric Service is much more complex, and has a higher impact at the customer if it does not work in future releases. This means for us, that we will rather avoid it at the customer, even it's a great tool.

I have heard that QlikTech Germany asks Partners to take over "support" for QlikBranch-extensions if Qlik's customers are asking for it. As some of these extensions are developed by Qlik employee's, this is getting a bit obscure.

[#6]

Hi Rob,

Appreciate the feedback.  Allow me to do my best to assuage your concerns.

Yes, these power tools are coming from a team within Qlik.  Correct, the tools are not supported by Qlik, but the APIs we use are supported.  The Qlik API code we use to develop our tools is generally available. In addition, we post the source code for all of our solutions on Github.

The EA team in North America supports the solutions we build with the Qlik APIs.  We have set up a number of different mechanisms for users to communicate with us including two Community spaces (EA PowertoolsQlik Sense Governed Self ServiceEA Powertools, wiki pages, and Github issues pages to raise questions, feedback, problems and bugs to our attention.

Moreover, before committing resources and releasing any power tool, we meet with members of the Qlik Products team to make sure we aren’t overlapping an existing initiative and to get their feedback on our ideas.  Thanks to some recent additions to our team, we are building relationships with the R&D group as well.  They have seen demonstrations of these tools and they are keen to find out how our solutions are received by the general public.

I’m happy to have additional conversations about the tools we are building.  Please private message me on Community anytime.

On behalf of the entire EA PowerTools team, we greatly appreciate any and all feedback to help us create useful solutions that enhance the Qlik experience.

Cheers,

Jeff G

[Lech_Miszkiewicz]

Hi, I admire EA Powertools team for their great work and everything they have done. This is awesome stuff. They are a life saver - as of now - when many frustrated customers comes back to us asking how to govern metrics or publish sheet from community to approved sheets. Without their contribution we would be empty handed.

My only question to Qlik is why things like "Sheet approver" are not part of QMC?

I agree that open code can be always fixed, however if we will start using tools like that when building Qlik Sense apps & environments for clients (and i guess we will) then one day (after upgrade) everything will stop suddenly working. We may say - not a big deal, but for the partner it is a huge deal when you get a not one but many customers complaining that "Qlik stopped working".  Then this becomes never ending story with frustrated customers coming back to partners with complains that solution does not work anymore after upgrade...so we patch things up and we spend a way to much time fixing not supported codes rather than actualy implementing Qlik.

I just think some of those great features like Sheet approver or Governed Metrics Service should be part of build in setup / part of QMC or HUB, don't you think Qlik Team?

kind regards

Lech

[amien]

I'm getting this error : Failed. Received error code: 403::Forbidden

What might cause this? on my local machine importing rules works fine. On client server it doens't

Do i need to change some setting in QMC? Or add a security rule?

Thanks in advanced. Working with 3.1.1

[#9]

‌403 would indicate a certificates issue.  Please visit the powertools group page on community EA Powertools

from here you can find links to guides as well as a github link to open issues.

Regards,

Jeff G

[amien]

I posted there the issue already. And link on how to import a certificate? Both QMC en the Utilities are on the same machine BTW

[#11]

Here is another video (sorry, I am not as prof as Michael Tarallo) which explains the use of the QMC Utility "Source Control", one of my favourite ones. It allows to download an app design as a set of .json files, which then may be uploaded to a git or other source control systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbhxHE8sESQ