check if qlikview server services are alive and able to response

[marcus_sommer]

Hi all,

are there any ways to check if qlikview server services are alive and able to response. I don't mean to look into the qmc or to check the services per windows services-check then the checks should be work automatically and a windows services-check queried only if the process is running and no error is communicated to windows - but this doesn't mean that the services worked properly.

I have seen the suggestion to tools like Servers Alive - https://community.qlik.com/message/196427#196427 - but I'm not sure if this isn't too comprehensive for me then I want not monitor anything I want only to be able to notice if the services aren't response anymore - to restart the services or the machine.

Maybe there are settings within the qmc or directly within the settings.ini which could do or at least support it.

In my old environment I have had a routine which checked each 6 hours if users are active on the access point (per reading the session logs) and if not restart all services - but I don't want to use such routines anymore. I have thought to something like to ping the services - is this possible? Are there other (easy) ways? How do you handle this topic?

- Marcus

[datanibbler]

Hi Marcus,

I was facing just the same problem sometime before last Christmas when me and my colleague were both on holiday and someone else was supposed to be managing all about QlikView.

Monitoring the QlikView services with QlikView is tricky ... all the more because QlikView is not officially managed by the IT dpt. and IT would neither check the services running on their server themselves nor implement a batch nor let us do anything on their server ...

The way I came up with at last is creating some small app that fails every time and run it as often as makes sense.

Set up the failure_email in the QMC so you will get an email every time it reloads.

=> When those emails suddenly don't arrive on time you know something is wrong and some service is probably down..

=> Maybe you could go further and implement some automatism checking that particular inbox.

HTH

Best regards,

DataNibbler

[marcus_sommer]

Hi DataNibbler,

it's excactly my topic - the holdiday and no team which could handle potentially problems. My emergency representatives will be in holdiday, too (I know it's very clever planned) and I will another colleague show how to restart the services and the machine if there are problems - but I would like to avoid it.

Sendings failure messages to me will be nearby on the worst case - the time-span in which I could react could be quite long and it meant I need to take my laptop on holiday and login - I need not many imagination to know what my wife will say to me ... - or I need to evaluate my mails with some macros (within my active outlook-account on this server) and start then batches (I have already done something like this by external data which we could only get per mail) but I would like to get away from this (horrible) macro-stuff. I would like to have sensible solutions.

- Marcus

[marcus_sommer]

No one else has trouble with this topic and tried any way to solve it or at least minimize the impact from it?

- Marcus

[Peter_Cammaert]

Check out the "QlikView Server Super Agent" in Power Tools 1.2 for QlikView. Maybe that one will fit your needs.

Best,

Peter

[marcus_sommer]

Thanks. I will have a look on it.

- Marcus

[datanibbler]

Hi,

well, we had those emails sent to a colleague who had been given access to the QMC. If that is not an option - yes, I guess you will need a macro to check your inbox and if the emails stop arriving, to just restart the services - usually, restarting the distribution_service is sufficient.

OR - something I tried to have implemented long ago, but (was) failed - just create a batch on the servers to restart the DS once a day regardless, say at midnight - that way you should pretty much be on the safe side - and it solves another problem too, that of the RAM blocked by QlikView continuously rising due to QlikView never releasing any RAM it grabs during peak_times.

However, that approach was immediately blocked by our IT, although I found it recommended by some experts here in the Community - and actually by QlikTech.

Best regards,

DataNibbler

[markodonovan]

HI Marcus,

Have you tried using the 'Servers Alive' tool.

I have used it in the past for various projects , to check ports are available on servers.

Worth a google.

Thanks

Mark

http://techstuffy.tv (YouTube - Please subscribe)

[marcus_sommer]

Thanks Mark. I have looked on Servers Alive and it's a quite heavy tool (at least to someone who didn't comes from administration- or network IT area) so that I would need quite a lot of efforts to learn to handle it. Further I would need to include our company IT (which usally takes a long time for tickets and explanations and so on before they do anything) because an installation per terminal server isn't possible by Servers Alive.

Therefore I'm on search for an easier way, maybe like: ping //QlikViewServer:4799/QMS/Service which didn't work but I hope that something like tis would be possible.

- Marcus

[markodonovan]

Hi Marcus,

In that case the QlikView Server Super agent that Peter mentioned is a good tool with email alerts as well.

If I can think of anything else I will let you know.

Mark