How QlikView helped me fix QlikView

By Barry Harmsen

Fixing QlikView using QlikViewToday, instead of a tip, I have a little anecdote about how QlikView helped me fix QlikView.

One project had me setting up a customized QlikView Server environment for an enterprise client. Part of the customization was ensuring that the service accounts, the ‘users’ that are used to run the QlikView services, do not require local administrator privileges.

Anyone who’s had to deal with this requirement knows that it isn’t exactly a straightforward job. Out of the box, the QlikView services will not work without local admin privileges. There is some help, but on a typical ‘hardened‘ version of Windows Server you still need to do additional troubleshooting to make things work.

A tool that I often use for these type of tasks is Process Monitor. This tool lets you monitor the file system, registry and process/thread activity in real-time, making it relatively easy to see what a piece is software is doing and where it might be missing some required permissions.

Process Monitor
In this project, I had used Process Monitor again to ensure that all services were working well without administrative rights. Things looked (and tested) great in the development and test environments, but on the acceptance server which, as it turned out, had some additional restrictions, some functions just stopped working.

Troubleshooting the issue turned out to be tough. Everything would work fine when I gave the service account local admin rights, only to stop working once these privileges were removed. Process Monitor would return over 150,000 events each time I executed the function, and while this tool offers good filtering functionality it proved hard to discover any significant errors.

That’s when I got my light bulb moment. Process Monitor lets you save the event log to a CSV file. Why not do two isolated runs, one with local admin rights, and one without and load the log files into QlikView? With some quick scripting, dragging and dropping I had put together a QlikView application that let me quickly analyze exactly what happened in each scenario.

Process Monitor data in QlikView

Sure enough, within 5 minutes I had found where the non-admin log went ‘off-track’ compared to the admin log. The next step was to fix the problem, run Process Monitor again and read the fixed log into the QlikView application to check that it behaved similar to the admin log. Bingo!

And that’s how QlikView helped me fix QlikView.