(written by Eli Dehaene - element61 Trainee in 2023)
Introduction
In a day and age where organizations are increasingly data-centric and all aspects of business seem to be controlled or monitored with the utmost detail, capturing and understanding a company’s data usage is often forgotten. This neglect can lead to suboptimal resource use and unnecessarily elevated costs. Asset utilization is a highly important topic in many enterprises, however, a clear view of a company’s data resources is just as relevant as sound knowledge of machine occupation in resource management. Thankfully, Qlik has developed several applications to comfortably resolve this issue and provide a clear picture of your firm’s metadata.
What are Qlik Cloud Monitoring Apps?
Qlik Cloud offers a wide spectrum of monitoring applications that can easily be installed on your company’s tenant, offering your business the opportunity to expand its understanding regarding the internal usage of Qlik Cloud. These apps can help generate a whole new scope of insights ranging from users’ entitlement and access information to application metadata and a whole lot more. At the time of writing, there are six freely available apps for Qlik Cloud, namely:
- Entitlement Analyzer
- App Analyzer
- Reload Analyzer
- Access Evaluator
- Qlik Application Automation Monitoring App
- OEM Dashboard
Each of these produces useful visualizations and interactive tables concerning its specific topic enabling the user to effortlessly piece together a correct and profound perception related to the handling of Qlik Cloud within the corporation and make proper and timely decisions if necessary.
What type of insights do these apps generate?
What follows is a short overview of the numerous monitoring applications offered by Qlik Sense and what eye-opening insights they offer as well as some basic example questions they can help answer.
Entitlement Analyzer
The Entitlement Analyzer offers administrators an all-inclusive dashboard designed to analyze the utilization of entitlement types such as analyzer, professional, and analyzer capacity among users in your tenant. This comprehensive tool renders a complete overview of when and where these specific entitlements are utilized.
Within the app's load script, an iterative approach is taken to examine license consumption, license overview, and license assignment metadata endpoints within a tenant. Additionally, extra API calls are made to access endpoints like Items, Users, Licenses, and Spaces. Through these steps, you're empowered to gain a panoramic understanding of your entitlement usage. This level of insight enables you to develop a profound awareness of how entitlements are consumed across your organization, down to a granular level.
Example questions: How can I track the usage of my tenant over time? How are my entitled users using the tenant? How can I better understand the usage of Analyzer Capacity vs. Analyzer & Professional Entitlements?
App Analyzer
The App Analyzer introduces an extensive dashboard that facilitates the in-depth analysis of application metadata throughout your tenant(s). This resource offers both developers and administrators a comprehensive perspective on the composition of all their applications. It delves into the minutiae of app data models, encompassing tables and fields, as well as resource consumption like RAM usage during reload processes. In other words, it ensures that your company stays within its tenant’s limits - the current standard totals 5 GB - avoiding unnecessary upgrades or redundant expenses.
Within the app's load script, just like the entitlement analyzer, an iterative strategy is employed to traverse application metadata endpoints within a tenant. In addition, supplementary API calls are made to access endpoints such as Items, Quotas, and Spaces. These combined actions provide a unified outlook on the architecture of all your applications, granting you the ability to comprehend the array of application types within your organizational framework down to the finest details.
Example questions: How can I track app RAM usage over time? How do I optimize my applications so that they can stay under the limit?
Reload Analyzer
The Reload Analyzer stands as a dedicated application for Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS, meticulously crafted to monitor and dissect application reloads taking place within the tenant. A plethora of advantages come hand in hand with this application, including:
- Detailed monitoring of reload instances categorized by type (Scheduled, Hub, In-App, API), and also sorted by User.
- Comprehensive visibility into all data connections associated with the latest reload of each application.
- Effortless identification of all applications utilizing a specific data connection.
- A thorough analysis of simultaneous reloads, alongside insights into the concurrent Peak Reload RAM utilization (particularly valuable for Dedicated Capacity setups).
- Precise tracking of reloads across various Spaces.
- A comprehensive overview of all tasks, accompanied by their respective statuses.
- Integration of alerts with metrics – for instance, receiving alerts when a task encounters consecutive failures (e.g. 5 failures in a row).
Example questions: How can I monitor reloads across the tenant? How can I see what data connections and files are being used? How can I view reload concurrency and peak reload RAM over time?”
Access Evaluator
Introducing the Access Evaluator, an all-encompassing dashboard meticulously designed to scrutinize user roles, access privileges, and permissions across your Qlik Sense tenant. This application offers a host of advantages, including:
- Effortlessly visualizing user access within spaces.
- Discerning how a user gains access to a specific space—be it through direct assignment or group membership.
- Providing a clear representation of access permissions across a designated group.
- Swiftly identifying the users associated with specific roles.
- ImageGaining insights into the role permissions attributed to individual users.
Example questions: What users and groups have access to space <X>? What users and groups have access to app <X>? How does a user have access to app <X>; via direct assignment, group, or app share? Are there redundancies in policies? E.g., does a user have the same access to a space via a direct assignment as well as a group? Who has what roles across the tenant?
OEM Dashboard
Presenting the OEM Dashboard—a tailor-made application within Qlik Cloud, exclusively crafted for OEM partners aiming to streamline data oversight across their clients' tenants. This tool offers a centralized hub for comprehensively monitoring a plethora of dimensions and measures, enabling effortless trend comparisons and expedited issue identification across diverse domains. Tasks that would otherwise demand laborious and manual efforts are now simplified and efficient.
This dynamic application combines data from three key sources: the App Analyzer, the Entitlement Analyzer, and the Reload Analyzer. Each of these monitoring applications, elucidated earlier, delves deeply into their respective domains. In unison, they offer a holistic view, unveiling a comprehensive image essential for the effective administration of an OEM environment.
Qlik Application Automation Monitoring App
This monitoring application includes different sheets representing diverse information on the Qlik Application Automation usage in your company’s tenant. It provides a clear overview of successful as well as failed automation runs which can be filtered on name, status, etc. In addition, a detailed distribution of the automation run history is supplied. Upon the initial data load into the application, a span of just 30 days of historical data is incorporated, consequently restricting the available history within the app to this same duration. However, after this initial data ingestion, data after the 30-day mark becomes accessible within the application, all thanks to the implementation of incremental data loading, meaning that only added data is loaded into the app.
By ensuring data loads are conducted at least once every 30 days, a seamless flow of continuous data is upheld within the application. This mechanism guarantees an uninterrupted stream of historical information at your fingertips.
How can your company install them?
The individual guides about each app are freely available on the web. These easy-to-follow blueprints clearly explain the necessary steps to install them on your tenant(s). More information on where to find these manuals and how to download them can be found in the Qlik Community blog post The Qlik Sense Monitoring Applications for Cloud and On-Premise. The link also provides access to the appropriate threads and FAQs if you have any trouble installing these applications.
Conclusion
In conclusion, these freely available and easily accessible monitoring applications can help optimize your business’s Qlik Cloud tenant. With little effort a whole lot of useful information is at your disposal, enabling a clear picture of your tenant as well as its users’ behaviours. Ameliorating your enterprise’s Qlik Cloud tenant can be a valuable step in elevating your business intelligence and ensuring flawless management of data resources.
