8 min read
Monitoring Dashboards
If you've been working with the Qlik Cloud Platform for a while, you'll 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's fine in itself — it means the environment is being used well and is adding value every day — but it can become quite difficult to keep an overview. To help you regain that overview, Qlik developed a number of monitoring apps. These are Qlik apps that you can download and upload into your Qlik Cloud environment. After a brief configuration and a reload, these apps give you insight into various topics. In this blog, Senior Consultant Lennaert van den Brink will walk you through the four most relevant monitoring apps, so you know exactly how to use them to get even more control over your Qlik environment!
Configuration
But first, how do you configure the monitoring apps? If you download one of the apps, you'll get a .zip file containing 2 files: the app in .qvf format and a PDF with installation instructions. The instructions are easy to follow, so we won't go through them in detail here, but in short it comes down to the following steps:
- Set up a user who will make the connection with the Qlik Cloud API. This user must be given at least the "Developer" role
- Generate an API key
- Upload the .qvf to Qlik Cloud
- Create a REST connection with this user and the corresponding API key
- Reload the app
It's worth noting that the connection you create is configured the same way for all 4 apps in this blog. We therefore recommend creating a separate Monitoring App workspace in your environment and publishing all the monitoring apps there. You then only need to create the connection once in that space, so you only have to go through the configuration steps once too. 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 the name gives a pretty good idea of what the app is for. The Reload Analyzer helps you gain insight into all the reloads being executed on the various apps in your environment. Unlike the on-premise variants of Qlik, in Cloud there isn't by default a single place where you can see across the whole environment which reloads have been executed. Fortunately, this app lets you create that overview again.
The app consists of 7 tabs. The first tab is the "About" tab. On this page, you'll 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 is stored in the app. 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 executed and how many of those tasks failed. A split is made between the different reload methods, so you can see whether it's the scheduled reloads that are failing, or, for example, the reloads that are started via an API.
The various sheets then give you insight, from multiple perspectives, into how the reloads in your environment are running. For example, on the "Connections" tab you'll see a Sankey chart that tells you which connections are used in which spaces or apps. This also lets you find out which connections aren't being used in any app.
The "Schedules and durations" tab contains, among other things, a heatmap that tells you when concurrent reloads take place. You can use this insight to better spread your reloads over time. If many apps are started at the same time, you'll run into the limits of Qlik Cloud, making the exact start and run time unpredictable (there's a maximum number of tasks that can be executed simultaneously per tenant). In addition, you can also see the average, min, max, and median run times of your tasks here, so you can easily identify outliers too.
On the "Failed Reloads" tab, you can then zoom in on the tasks that didn't finish successfully. In this tab, you can filter by app or error type, and the detail table immediately gives you a lot of useful information for analyzing 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, since it's also available for the on-premise environment. The purpose of the App Analyzer is to manage and optimize the apps in your Qlik environment.
The "Dashboard" tab of the App Analyzer has a number of "Thresholds" on the left-hand side. You can adjust these thresholds in the script to your own preferences. The thresholds help you identify, for example, which apps cause very heavy reloads or contain synthetic keys. Especially in an environment with a lot of self-service usage, it's important to keep an eye out for apps that have an excessively large impact on your environment. Tip: you can easily set up an alert on these visualizations, so you're proactively warned when an app exceeds the limits.
The app also shows, through the various visualizations, how you might optimize an app that's grown too large. For example, on the dashboard tab you can see 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 how the various KPIs for all your apps have changed over time. This can help, for example, to estimate when an app will exceed a threshold, or when it did so in the past.
3# Entitlement Analyzer
The Entitlement Analyzer gives you insight into the usage of the available licenses in an environment. On the "Dashboard" tab, for example, 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. Alongside 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 biggest consumers of your minutes. A crucial insight you can use to deploy your licenses optimally, for example by assigning these heavy users a fixed license.
The "Users" tab lets you zoom in on the usage of individual people. You can see which apps they've opened and how long they viewed each app. Looking at it from the other side, on the "App consumption overview" tab you can see which apps are used the most.
Admittedly, there's still quite a bit of information you might want to know about your users that doesn't have a standard visualization available in this app. Fortunately, the information is there, and you can add it to the app yourself, self-service, as needed. A handy addition you can make yourself is, for example, a table per user with the master item "Days Since Last Usage", so you can identify which users haven't been in Qlik Cloud for a long time. With a bit of fine-tuning, this dashboard can become a very powerful tool for analyzing the adoption of your Qlik Cloud platform.
4# Access Evaluator
Finally, there's the Access Evaluator. As you may have noticed, it's very easy to lose track of who has access to which resource in Qlik Cloud, and why. The Access Evaluator is indispensable for regaining that overview.
Most of the work in this app actually happens in the "Access Evaluation" tab. In this tab, you'll find all kinds of subtabs that show, from different perspectives, who has access to which resource and whether this comes about through a direct assignment of rights, or through membership of a specific group or having a certain role. There isn't really that much more to describe about this app, but that simplicity is exactly this app's strength!
In conclusion
In this blog, we've shown you which monitoring apps Qlik makes available by default. The great thing about these apps, though, is that they're just regular Qlik apps, so you can customize them to your heart's content. Be sure to also make use of the master items present in every app to quickly build exactly the perspective you need for your management task. To make the whole thing even more powerful, you can deploy alerts and application automation. For example, let Qlik automatically assign licenses to users who consume a lot of minutes, and revoke licenses again as soon as they're no longer used. Or send a message in Teams to the administrators every morning with an overview of the tasks that failed in the past 24 hours. This way, you can manage proactively and make even more efficient use of your Qlik environment!
Written by Lennaert van den Brink
Senior Consultant