Make MQ Work Harder

Early and current releases of IBM MQ for NonStop are subject to the following information being placed into a single text token:

• Error condition
• Cause, Effect, Recovery
• MQ Manager
• MQ Channel
• MQ Queue

Ordinarily, the diagnostic information should be held within the Event buffer as a set of discrete tokens. In the earlier releases of MQ, this was the case but in subsequent versions relevant information has become embedded in large text tokens.

This approach makes the error messages difficult to retrieve, process and escalate.

Imagine several MQ EMS events being issued to your event viewer – how do you tell which is ‘good’ or which is ‘bad’? The same IBM.MQ.5, event number 00005 could be issued for a variety of ‘good’ & ‘bad’ conditions.

Take control of your MQ Events

MQ Gate from Insider Technologies provides a solution where it obtains the source MQ events including its lengthy text value, parses them and creates new, unique tokenised EMS events.

It’s easy to use, and purpose built to enable NonStop administrators to improve visibility of their environment:

• Extract the IBM MQ error number from the source event, e.g. AMQ9512
• Extract any other required attributes such as Channel, Queue
• Generate a new, fully tokenised EMS event

MQ Gate utilises source attributes and generates them as discrete tokens within the new event:

• Event number
• MQ Manager
• MQ Queue
• MQ Channel
• MQ Process
• Event text
• Subject token

How does it work?

1. IBM MQ issues events to an EMS collector.
2. The MQGATE program utilises a compiled MQGWFILT filter to retrieve nominated source IBM MQ EMS event and associated text from the EMS collector.
3. Based on the content of the configuration file – MQGWCONF – the MQGATE process will create and issue a second event in $0. This event will have a unique event number and in addition any attribute names will be extracted from the body of the text and included in the new event as discrete tokens, e.g. a Subject Token containing the name of the MQ Queue.
4. Deciding on which events to process and whether any new tokens are added, is performed within the MQGWCONF file. A Pathway interface is provided to help maintain this database.

Get the benefits now!

Now that unique, tokenised EMS events are being issued for MQ via the use of MQ Gate, users can monitor just the specific events they are interested in.

For example, instead of monitoring all the same IBM.99.0, event 5 events and having to scroll through an event viewer such as ViewPoint to review the event text as to what the event is referring to, the unique EMS event structure as generated by MQ Gate allows a user to filter their monitoring software on selected event numbers and/or subject tokens, e.g.

• SSID – INSIDER.MQEMSG.5
• EVENT NUMBER – 8016
• SUBJECT – MQ Channel Name, e.g. INSIDER.TO.LONDON
• EVENT TEXT – ‘WebSphere MQ Channel Changed’

Exception alerting is an immediate benefit of MQ Gate, as based on the above, you can specify which events you are interested in. Otherwise, a user needs to monitor ALL IBM.99.0, event 5 events and by doing so, will find it slow and difficult to determine which of these MQ events are a cause for concern.

The product arrives pre-configured with a wide range of converted events and when installed, MQ Gate is actively monitoring the EMS collector for any IBM MQ events.

You can follow Insider Technologies on Twitter @insidertech, on LinkedIn, or get in touch via hello@insidertech.co.uk