ETI-NET MQGate for HPE NonStop

Crossed wires! Missed signals! Confusing requests! Every data center operations team member has experienced something similar as they observe the operations of systems on their watch. Nothing is more distracting than the unknown, especially when it is not easily and quickly determined if that text displayed is informational or an important alert. When disparate systems are networked and interacting anything other than a clear indication of what is taking place can lead to application failures. For applications that are mission critical and more often than not, customer facing, this can lead to financial loss for the enterprise.

Outages of any kind are an anathema to the NonStop community. After all, the investments made in NonStop were based on its fault tolerance and its ability to operate around the clock, year in and year out. However, in today’s hybrid IT world, NonStop systems no longer find themselves standing alone.  Rather, NonStop systems today find themselves communicating with adjacent systems via common protocols and services and for the NonStop community, the availability of IBM’s centerpiece messaging system, WebSphere MQ, better known simply as MQ. With MQ, enterprises have a middleware solution that allows for the transport of information between nominated platforms and following the software port, NonStop can be one of the nominated platforms participating in the flow of information between applications.

Over the years numerous subsystems popular on other platforms have been ported to NonStop. Whether middleware and infrastructure or complete applications, NonStop systems come with many tools and services aimed at ensuring communications between these products, the operating system and ultimately, the operations team are unambiguous even as they are quickly recognized as calls to action. However, in the case of the MQ port, the granularity of information being provided doesn’t quite meet these standards and as a result, can lead to missed critical alerts.

“Unlike what is present within other NonStop products, MQ diagnostic information should be held within the EMS event buffer as a set of discrete tokens. However, regardless of the version of MQ installed, all relevant information has been embedded in large event text tokens,” said ETI-NET COO, Sylvain Tétreault. “Storing all this information in a single text token makes it difficult for users to view, monitor, and manage individual issues. This approach makes the error messages difficult to retrieve, process and escalate as highlighted above.”

However, regardless of the version of MQ installed, all relevant information has been embedded in large event text tokens. Additionally, only one, or at the maximum, two events numbers are utilized and all issued for varying conditions. The impact is:

• Same event number issued for all types of situations, e.g. information, failures, completion
• MQ Manager, Channel, Queue and description of the condition, are all contained in a large text token
• No unique EMS Manager, Subject, or Process Descriptor tokens

Recognizing the importance of operational consistency, MQGate for HPE NonStop (MQGate) has now become available from ETI-NET. The sole purpose of MQGate is to resolve these problems. MQGate takes source IBM MQ Event Management System (EMS) events and converts them to new, easier-to-identify fully tokenized EMS events. “Think of it this way,” said Tétreault, “MQGate acts as a translator, converting the source IBM MQ events into new, unique tokenized events, making it easier to identify exceptions within your EMS event and alert subsystems.”

Instead of monitoring all the same MQ event number X and having to scroll through an event viewer to determine what the event is referring to, the unique EMS event structure that is generated by MQGate allows operators to filter their monitoring software on selected event numbers and/or subject tokens, for example:

• SSID
• Event number
• Subject
• Event text

Exception alerting allows users to identify which events are critical to their business, improving triage speeds and lowering the risk to mission-critical processes. “Thanks to MQGate’s unique EMS event tokenization,” said Tétreault, “users may then identify and select only the events that they are interested in, and if required, manage and escalate accordingly.”

When things go wrong there is no room for confusion. Clear communication is paramount as there are situations where crossed wires and missed signals can compound the situation. Clarity is of uttermost importance and for the NonStop user the pressure to ensure continuous operations is equally of paramount importance. With MQGate, clarity and simplified communication is now at hand and for NonStop users reliant on MQ to facilitate the flow of information between applications, there is a significant reduction in operational outages that might otherwise occur.

To find out more from the ETI-NET team about MQGate for NonStop Systems visit the HPE web site or simply follow this link –

https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a50005455enw

Should you wish to know more about this latest product from ETI-NET, simply call or email us as we would be only too happy to answer any questions you may have.

Said Hini
said.hini@etinet.com
(514) 663-0501
http://etinet.com