Qlik Application Automation is a no-code visual interface for building automated workflows between common cloud based and on-premises enterprise applications. It’s other purpose within the Qlik Cloud platform is to automate the administration of the platform, such as app reloads, and user and space administration. An automation is designed in a workflow and consists of a series of blocks executed to achieve a particular purpose. Each automation can be triggered manually, on a scheduled basis, by an external event, or by a subscribed webhook.

Active Intelligence: Dynamic Actions

This area focusses on workflows which are triggered by thresholds of KPIs contained within a Qlik Analytics dashboard. In the event of a measure or KPI going above or below a certain threshold, then the relevant audience can be notified by Teams, Slack, or email. For example, in a retail company, this could be used to monitor the stock levels of a product and it’s availability to complete an order. If there are insufficient stock levels, then this could trigger an automation to notify the relevant stakeholders.

Active Intelligence: Business Process Integration

This area focusses on automations which can be used to manage the integration between well-known SaaS based applications. For example, where a new customer has been registered in HubSpot, an automation can manage the synchronisation of that added user between other applications such as Salesforce and SAP. Another example could be where a prospect attends an event, whose attendance could be captured in a campaign marketing tool such as Marketo. Once this prospect has been captured in Marketo, a workflow can manage the synchronisation of that prospect into Salesforce for a sales campaign, and an automated delivery of an email with relevant customer targeted whitepapers.

Analytics DevOps: Analytics Operations

This area focusses on the automation of back-end administration of the Qlik Cloud platform. It includes tasks such as new user onboarding and management, automated app exports to applications such as GitHub for the purpose of version control, automated reloads of Qlik Apps, automated assignments of users to managed or shared spaces, or allocation of licenses to a new user. The use of Qlik Application Automation in this area is a powerful solution to automate the administration of a Qlik Cloud tenant. This can help reduce risk of user error, and free up human administrative resources of the Qlik Cloud tenant.

Analytics DevOps: Analytics Automation

This area focusses on the automation of Qlik Apps, in terms of app creation, data loads, creation of measures, and dimensions to be assigned to an app. This can also cover areas where a reload of an app has passed or failed, and the relevant Qlik Cloud administrator or app author needs to receive a notification about the event.

A workflow can easily be created from scratch within a drag and drop interface, where the user can drag in blocks from out of the box connectors such as HubSpot, Salesforce, GitHub, or Microsoft Office 365. The blocks are joined together in the required flow to complete a particular task.

QAA also comes with a wide selection of pre-built templates around different topic areas or connectors. These can easily be loaded for use, and modified with a few steps to adopt the credentials specific to the user, or be based upon a specific Qlik Analytics App of the user’s choice.