CXOne IBM MQ Monitor
Introducing CXOne IBM MQ Monitor
Do your processes rely on consistent and reliable message delivery? Do you need to actively monitor your messaging queues? DeeperThanBlue’s CXOne IBM MQ Monitor keeps an eye on your MQ environments and helps you keep your systems running.
IBM MQ is a messaging middleware that enables applications to communicate securely and reliably across different systems, platforms, and networks. It ensures message delivery even in cases of network failures, providing features like message queuing, transaction support, and publish-subscribe messaging. By decoupling application components, IBM MQ enhances scalability, resilience, and fault tolerance in enterprise environments. The core components of IBM MQ include:
- Messages: Collections of data meaningful to participating applications.
- Queues: Objects that store messages.
- Queue Managers: System functions responsible for managing message queues and handling data transfer between queue managers via channels and provide services for applications to connect.
These mechanisms can be leveraged by industries requiring high transactional integrity, such as finance and retail where IBM MQ’s assurance that ‘once, and only once’ message delivery is vital. Visibility of this message delivery is achieved through data logging and statistical information. Therefore, monitoring plays a critical role in these environments.
What is MQ Monitor?
CXOne IBM MQ Monitor is a lightweight monitoring solution for IBM MQ environments, providing insights into the health and state of Queue Managers. Since a Queue Manager’s state often reflects the behaviour and health of its connected applications, the DTB MQ Monitor can offer indirect network and application monitoring within the context of the MQ environment.
Why should I monitor my MQ environment?
If there is a problem with a computer, it doesn’t necessarily proactively tell us what the problem is, and the same can be said about IBM MQ. While real-time logging can reveal errors, these aren’t automatically reported.
Users of IBM MQ must be assured that the process runs consistently and reliably to ensure business continuity, operational stability, and prevent reputational damage.
Therefore, performance monitoring is an integral component of the MQ infrastructure to provide visibility of system health, as it can:
- Prevent downtime: Real-time monitoring enables early detection of issues such as message congestion or queue manager failures, facilitating prompt resolution and minimising downtime.
- Optimise performance: Monitoring tools help identify bottlenecks and optimise resource utilisation, ensuring efficient message processing and maintaining high system performance.
- Ensure data integrity: Monitoring guarantees that messages are delivered correctly, maintaining data integrity and reliability.
- Plan scalability: Historical data from monitoring aids in planning future infrastructure expansions to meet growing demands.
How does CXOne IBM MQ Monitor help maintain system health?
DeeperThanBlue’s CXOne IBM MQ Monitor works across MQ connected systems to detect and report on conditions, including but not limited to:
- Queue manager down
- Queue full/Queue depth high/other specified Queue event
- Message written to Dead Letter Queue or other specified Backout Queue
- Queue inactive: no input-output activity
- Channel stopped
Alerts and reports are created and automatically distributed by email and as a JIRA ticket through REST API.
FTP Support
An FTP server can experience similar connectivity issues to MQ as well as performance related problems. MQ Monitor works well in supporting integration environments that bridge message-based and file-based transfers by including FTP host monitoring. Both SFTP and FTPS are supported.
MQ Monitor will report on conditions including, but not limited to:
- FTP host down or not reachable
- File age detection
- File count/file depth
- Authentication lockout
Why should I choose CXOne IBM MQ Monitor?
Lightweight and easy to install
MQ Monitor is not resource intensive, and can quickly and easily be deployed on your existing systems.
Cross-platform
MQ Monitor runs as service on Windows or as a cron job for Unix.
Container-ready
Configured with Dockerfile for deployment on Kubernetes and cloud environments.
Flexible
Processes are highly configurable and can support multiple queue managers where required.
Intuitive
Cascading config files are logically classified and are text editable to allow bespoke configuration.
In-flight configuration
Processes can be reconfigured without the need to interrupt system monitoring.
Reporting-reset
After remedial actions, the monitor can be instructed to revalidate on next pass to ensure correctness.
Complex configuration handling
MQ Monitor supports and monitors IBM MQ even in complex, resilient configurations like those designed for high availability (HA), disaster recovery (DR), and multi-instance queue manager setups.
Who else uses CXOne IBM MQ Monitor?
We have installed MQ Monitor for several clients, including:
- XPO Logistics – in conjunction with Mazda
- Sanderson Transport – in conjunction with BMW
- Woodside Logistics (Ireland) – in conjunction with BMW
- StoneX Financial Services US and Global
- Greencore Group plc
How much does CXOne IBM MQ Monitor cost?
MQ Monitor is licensed on the number of environments to be monitored and the size of the systems that it is monitoring. The license is term based and includes services to cover:
- Initial setup and configuration
- Annual helpdesk support (business hours (email) service desk with premium options for extended hours and 24/7 coverage where required)
Keep your messaging systems healthy!
If your processes rely heavily on consistent messaging, talk to us about CXOne IBM MQ Monitor, and keep your messaging running.
+44 (0)114 399 2820