Monitoring dashboards

If you have been working with the Qlik Cloud Platform for a while, you will notice that it keeps getting fuller. You once started with a nice, clean, empty environment, but now there are all kinds of new users, apps, tasks and much more. That is a good thing in itself, because it means the environment is being used well and adds value every day, but it can become quite difficult to keep track of everything. To help you regain that overview, Qlik developed a number of monitoring apps. These are Qlik apps that you can download and upload to your Qlik Cloud environment. After a short configuration and a reload, these apps give you insight into various topics. In this blog, Senior Consultant Lennaert van den Brink explains the four most relevant monitoring apps, so you know exactly how to use them to gain even more control over your Qlik environment!

Configuration

But first, how do you configure the monitoring apps? When you download one of the apps, you get a .zip file containing two files: the app in .qvf format and a PDF with installation instructions. The instructions are easy to follow, so we will not repeat them in detail here, but in short it comes down to the following steps:

1. Set up a user who will make the connection to the Qlik Cloud API. This user needs at least the "Developer" role
2. Generate an API key
3. Upload the .qvf to Qlik Cloud
4. Create a REST connection with this user and the associated API key
5. Reload the app

It is useful to note that the connection you create is configured the same way for all four apps in this blog. We therefore recommend creating a separate Monitoring App space in your environment and publishing all monitoring apps there. That way, you only need to create the connection once in that space, so you only have to go through the configuration steps once. This also saves on maintenance, because when the API key expires, you only need to replace it in one place.

1# Reload Analyzer

The nice thing about the monitoring apps is that their names describe pretty well what each app is for. The Reload Analyzer helps you gain insight into all reloads being run on the various apps in your environment. Unlike the on-premise versions of Qlik, Qlik Cloud does not have a single place by default where you can see which reloads have been run across the entire environment. Fortunately, this app lets you create that overview.

The app consists of seven tabs. The first is the "About" tab. On this page, you will find an explanation of the dashboard, but it also immediately shows a number of interesting statistics. For example, you can see when the app itself was last loaded and how much history the app contains. The second tab, however, is the actual starting point of the dashboard. On this "Dashboard" tab, you can see at a glance how many tasks have been run and how many of them have failed. A breakdown is made by reload method, so you can see whether it is the scheduled reloads that are failing or, for example, the reloads started via an API.

The various sheets then give insight from multiple perspectives into the ins and outs of the reloads in your environment. For example, the "Connections" tab shows a Sankey chart that tells you which connections are used in which spaces or apps. This also lets you find out which connections are not used in any app.

The "Schedules and durations" tab includes a heatmap that tells you when concurrent reloads take place. You can use this insight to spread your reloads better over time. If many apps are started at the same time, you will run into the limits of Qlik Cloud, making the exact start time and duration unpredictable (there is a maximum number of tasks that can run simultaneously per tenant). You can also see the average, min, max and median durations of your tasks here, so you can easily identify outliers.

On the "Failed Reloads" tab, you can then zoom in on the tasks that did not complete successfully. You can filter the tab by app or error type, and the detail table immediately gives you plenty of useful information to analyze the problem, such as the start and end time of the task and the description of the error message.

2# App Analyzer

The App Analyzer may look familiar to users of the on-premise version of Qlik, as it is also available for the on-premise environment. The purpose of the App Analyzer is to manage and optimize the apps in your Qlik environment.

On the left side of the App Analyzer's "Dashboard" tab, there are a number of "Thresholds". You can adjust these thresholds in the script to suit your own preferences. The thresholds help you identify which apps cause very heavy reloads, for example, or contain synthetic keys. Especially in an environment with a lot of self-service use, it is important to keep an eye out for apps that have an excessively large impact on your environment. Tip: you can easily set an alert on these visualizations, so you are proactively notified when an app exceeds the limits.

Through its various visualizations, the app also shows how you might optimize an app that is too large. For example, the dashboard tab shows which tables and fields within an app have a high RAM footprint, contain a large number of records or have a high number of unique values, so you can quickly see where the biggest gains can be made.

The "Rolling Analysis" tab is also interesting. On this tab, you can see for all your apps how the various KPIs have changed over time. This can help you estimate, for example, when an app will exceed a threshold, or when that happened in the past.

3# Entitlement Analyzer

The Entitlement Analyzer gives insight into the use of the available licenses in an environment. On the "Dashboard" tab, you can see at a glance how many Professional and Analyzer licenses you have available in total and how many of them are currently assigned. You can also see whether the assigned licenses are actually being used. In addition to the assigned licenses, the dashboard also shows how many Capacity Minutes have already been consumed and how many are still available. Here too, you can see which users are the heavy consumers of your minutes. This is a crucial insight you can use to deploy your licenses optimally, for example by assigning a fixed license to these heavy users.

The "Users" tab lets you zoom in on the usage of individual people. You can see which apps they have opened and how long they viewed each app. Looking at it from the other side, the "App consumption overview" tab shows which apps are used the most.

Admittedly, there is still quite a lot of information you would like to know about your users for which no standard visualization is available in this app. Fortunately, the information is in there, and you can add it to the app yourself in a self-service way as needed. A handy addition you can create yourself is, for example, a table per user with the master item "Days Since Last Usage", so you can spot which users have not been in Qlik Cloud for a long time. With a little fine-tuning, this dashboard can become a very powerful tool for analyzing the adoption of your Qlik Cloud platform.

4# Access Evaluator

Finally, there is the Access Evaluator. As you may have noticed, it is very easy to lose track in Qlik Cloud of who has access to which resource and why. The Access Evaluator is indispensable for regaining this overview.

Most of the work in this app is actually done in the "Access Evaluation" tab. This tab contains all kinds of subtabs that show, from different perspectives, who has access to which resource and whether this comes from a direct assignment of rights, or from membership of a specific group or having a particular role. There is not much more to say about this app, but that very simplicity is its strength!

Finally

In this blog, we have shown which monitoring apps Qlik makes available as standard. The great thing about these apps, however, is that they are just regular Qlik apps, so you can customize them to your heart's content. Be sure to make use of the master items included in every app to quickly create exactly the perspective you need for your management task. To make it all even more powerful, you can use alerts and application automation. For example, have Qlik automatically assign licenses to users who consume a lot of minutes and revoke licenses as soon as they are no longer used. Or send the administrators a message in Teams every morning with an overview of the tasks that failed in the past 24 hours. That way, you can manage your environment proactively and make even more efficient use of your Qlik environment!

Excited after reading this blog, but could you use some help with your Qlik Cloud environment? Get in touch with us using the button below and we will help you further.