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You're reading from  QlikView Server and Publisher

Product typeBook
Published inJan 2014
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ISBN-139781782179856
Edition1st Edition
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Author (1)
Stephen Redmond
Stephen Redmond
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Stephen Redmond

Stephen Redmond is the CTO and Qlik Luminary at CapricornVentis - a QlikView Elite Partner. He is the author of several books, including QlikView for Developers Cookbook and QlikView Server and Publisher, both published by Packt Publishing. He is also the author of the popular DevLogixseries for SalesLogix developers. In 2006, after many years of working with CRM systems, reporting and analysis solutions, and data integration, Stephen started working with QlikView. Since then, CapricornVentis has become QlikView's top partner in the UK and Ireland territories, and with Stephen as the head of the team, they have implemented QlikView in a wide variety of enterprise and large-business customers across a wide range of sectors, from public sector to financial services to large retailers. In 2014, Stephen was awarded the Luminary status by Qlik in recognition of his product advocacy. He regularly contributes to online forums, including the Qlik Community.
Read more about Stephen Redmond

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Chapter 8. Monitoring and Troubleshooting QlikView Server

Once you have your QlikView Server up and running, you will need to know where to go to monitor and fix issues that might arise.

The first place to start troubleshooting issues will always be the logfiles for various services, and we will review the locations of these files in this chapter.

One place that systems administrators would think of looking, but QlikView administrators might not, is the Windows event log. This will identify the points at which issues with the operating system might be causing a problem.

QlikTech are mindful that it is useful for administrators to have tools to help them with monitoring their system. They have created a QlikView System Monitor application that draws data together from various logfiles, to allow you to view information in one place. QlikTech have also released a data governance tool called the QlikView Governance Dashboard that uses Expressor technology to scan your implementation for metadata...

Locating and interpreting logfiles


Each of the services has its own logfiles in its own folder. In this section, we will locate the files and have a look at the kind of content that you might expect to find in them. We will also examine how to configure the logging options.

Locating the QlikView Server logs

By default, the QlikView Server saves its logfiles to the ProgramData folder at C:\ProgramData\QlikTech\QlikViewServer. This location can be modified in the System | Setup | QlikView Servers | Logging tab.

There are four types of log generated for the QlikView Server:

Using QlikView administration dashboards


QlikTech has released two dashboards to help you manage the implementation. The System Monitor loads the data from the logfiles mentioned earlier and presents the results visually, and the QlikView Governance Dashboard allows you to monitor your data sources and shows you how that data is used.

Configuring and using the QlikView System Monitor application

All of the logfiles have their own format, but all are easily read into QlikView. But wouldn’t it be great if someone had already done all the hard work? Well, they have. There is a QlikView application created by the guys in QlikTech Support that reads all of the various logfiles, and creates a dashboard that you can use. This file has gone through many iterations and the most recent version is always available from the QlikView Community, by searching for QlikView System Monitor. The most recent version, at the time of writing was v5.0.16, and is available from the following URL:

http://community...

Using QlikView power tools


The power tools are a set of unsupported, free of charge tools that have been created by QlikTech to help you manage your implementation.

The latest versions of the power tools are available from the QlikView Community at: http://community.qlikview.com/docs/DOC-3059.

There are 12 tools in all. Some of my favorites are described here.

Server Agent

The Server Agent is an easy-to-use tool that allows you to manage the state of QlikView services on many servers from one location.

This tool allows you to stop and start services—one at a time or all at once. You can also change the service user for all of the services on one server at one go (which is great, and saves you the trouble of having to change them one at a time).

Tip

You can create a Windows task to start this tool at login; then, it will be available immediately when you need it.

QV User Manager

This is a command-line tool that you can use to manage users outside of QMC. It is good because it allows you to perform...

Reviewing the Windows event logs


QlikView runs on the Windows platform; so, it depends on things being correct in the Windows operating system for QlikView to function correctly. If there are problems in Windows, then you could see problems in QlikView that are difficult to troubleshoot just from the QlikView logs. There could be several things that go wrong in Windows, from hardware issues to administrators changing settings, and it is useful to know where to get information about them.

The Event Viewer tool is available from Administrative Tools or from the Computer Management tool. You can also just run the eventvwr.exe file.

Any QlikView-related errors will be probably found under the Application log area. Depending on how the server is configured, the Security logs may also provide useful information. Finally, the System log has general errors about the services.

In the preceding screenshot, you can see that the distribution service does not have access to its configuration file. The cause...

Summary


In this chapter, we looked at the locations of all of the different QlikView services’ logfiles and the information that each of the services contain. We have also seen how to use the QlikView System Monitor to bring these logfiles together into an application that you can use to keep tabs on the implementation. We reviewed a few of the power tools that are useful for managing your system. Finally, we looked at how to find out information from the Windows event logs.

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Author (1)

author image
Stephen Redmond

Stephen Redmond is the CTO and Qlik Luminary at CapricornVentis - a QlikView Elite Partner. He is the author of several books, including QlikView for Developers Cookbook and QlikView Server and Publisher, both published by Packt Publishing. He is also the author of the popular DevLogixseries for SalesLogix developers. In 2006, after many years of working with CRM systems, reporting and analysis solutions, and data integration, Stephen started working with QlikView. Since then, CapricornVentis has become QlikView's top partner in the UK and Ireland territories, and with Stephen as the head of the team, they have implemented QlikView in a wide variety of enterprise and large-business customers across a wide range of sectors, from public sector to financial services to large retailers. In 2014, Stephen was awarded the Luminary status by Qlik in recognition of his product advocacy. He regularly contributes to online forums, including the Qlik Community.
Read more about Stephen Redmond

Log type

Description

Session

This log records useful information about the users’ sessions such as connection time, client type, license type. The file is a tab-delimited text file that can be easily read into QlikView.

Performance

On a defined schedule, this log records the current performance statistics for the server. This includes information about the use of memory, active users, active sessions, and so on. Again...