5 min read
Qlik Application Automation
At the end of October 2020, Qlik announced its acquisition of Blendr.io. Even then, Qlik announced that the acquisition would help them with what Qlik calls "Active Intelligence". Since September 28, the first result of that acquisition has been visible in the SaaS version of Qlik in the form of the "Application Automation" feature. In this blog, we explain exactly what is meant by Active Intelligence and show you, using a number of use cases, how Application Automation lets you trigger actions in a flash based on your data in Qlik SaaS.
What is Active Intelligence?
Anyone who has worked with Qlik or other BI tooling for a while will recognize the following process: overnight, all your data sources are read out one by one, and the data is processed and loaded into your dashboard. Throughout the workday, all kinds of new data is stored in your system. Think, for example, of updates on ongoing sales deals in your CRM system. If you're lucky, your dashboard is refreshed with fresh data once an hour during the day. That means you can only analyze that new data from your CRM system in the context of your dashboard once an hour.
Active Intelligence is a paradigm that states data shouldn't be static, but rather in motion. As soon as new relevant data is entered into your source system, that data should get to work fueling your actions. This means, for example, that if a new lead is entered by marketing into your CRM system, this immediately triggers a refresh of your dashboard, but perhaps also that an email is sent right away to that customer's representative so they can act on this information.
Application Automation in Qlik Sense SaaS
That all sounds nice and good, but a solution like that requires a lot of programming work. Different systems from multiple vendors need to be linked together by people who not only understand the process, but also have the skills to translate this into code that computers understand. That's exactly the problem Application Automation solves. Application Automation is a so-called "no-code" solution. Using building blocks, called "Blocks", a series of actions can be triggered. For example, there's a Block that makes a selection for you in a Qlik application, and a second Block that then retrieves the contents of a table based on that selection. The only thing you need to do to configure such a Block is drag the Block to the right place in your workflow and, using drop-down selections, select the right values for app, field name, and field value.
There are 4 options for triggering an Automation. First of all, you can start an Automation manually or have it start on a schedule, just as you were already used to with reload tasks. But the more interesting options are "Triggered" and "Webhook". By choosing the "Triggered" method, you create a REST API endpoint in your Qlik SaaS environment (in GET and POST form) that you can use to call the automation from another application. This is useful if, for example, you have a Data Warehouse for your data — the software of your Data Warehouse can then trigger an Automation in Qlik as soon as it's done processing, which can, for example, reload the relevant dashboards with new data. The "Webhook" option is actually exactly the opposite. With the "Webhook" function, you ask an application to start the Automation based on an event. The "Webhook" currently has 2 connectors: Qlik itself and Eventbrite. With the Qlik webhook, you can trigger actions when, for example, an app is done loading, but also when, for example, a new user is created or an app is published. An example of an application of this functionality is the flow below, which, on our own Qlik SaaS environment, checks every completed Task Reload to see whether the task was successful. If the task has an error, a message is automatically sent to a Teams channel so our application administrators can fix the error right away.
A few use cases for inspiration
The possibilities of the new Application Automation are virtually endless. The feature is immediately available for free to all Qlik Sense SaaS users. There's currently a fair-use policy in place, which means that up to 5000 automations may be started per Tenant (= Qlik SaaS environment) per month. Note that this includes both successful and failed automations, so also those started during development. Nevertheless, the barrier to getting started with Qlik Application Automation is very low, so below are a few use cases for inspiration:
- Check daily whether a new file has been uploaded to the sFTP server. If the file has been uploaded, start processing via a Qlik Sense reload. If the file isn't there yet, send an email to the contact person and try again an hour later
- Copy the expressions from master items of one Qlik Sense Sales dashboard to all other dashboards in the same workspace.
- Check all accounts in your Salesforce application that have the "Champion" status; if they have a high sales-readiness score but haven't been approached by the sales department in a while, automatically create a task in Salesforce and send a notification to the relevant representative. See the video below from Qlik in which this case is built from start to finish in Application Automation.
Curious about the possibilities of Qlik Sense but never used it? Sign up for the Qlik Sense Basics training. During this free online training, you'll learn how to use Qlik Sense. Think of making selections, bookmarks, and we'll even briefly look at building a data model. Already using Qlik Sense and want to move to the newest version? Then request an upgrade of your environment via the button below.
Written by Lennaert van den Brink
Senior Consultant