Help choosing MQSeries Monitoring tool.

[Quelish]

Hello,
My company is currently looking at several monitoring tools for MQSeries, and we have come down to 2 products to choose from. Those products are MQSoftware's QPasa! and Tivoli Manager for MQSeries.
I was wondering if anyone could provide feedback on either of these products. I am looking for any pros/cons for both products.

Thanks in advance,
Travis Wilkinson

 

[nukenrg]

Sat through a presentation of QPasa! while taking an MQ class at MQSoftware. Seems nice, but the presentations always seems nice. Haven't had any experience with Tivoli's product. We're living the Candle nightmare now!

 

[pmeekin]

Monitoring tools are like problem management systems and governments - they're all awful so you just have to try to choose the least bad one!

I've done extensive work with QPasa 2.3. It is good in some respects and awful in others. If you have a large site, say over 20 QMgrs it can become unmanageable.

If you have a fairly static environment, setting up basic monitoring and alerting is not too bad. However, if you are constantly making configuration changes, defining and deleting queues, channels etc. the rules are all updated via a GUI - and a pretty inflexible GUI, at that!

And that I think is the major problem with QPasa - most things can only be updated by the GUI, which is fine for a couple of systems but just not really useful in a large environment.

I believe that V3 is supposed to make things better including the ability to create event rule templates. At the moment, you need to have a separate rule defined for each queue/channel on each QMgr that you want to monitor! And depending upon what you want to do, you may need multiple rules for each queue/channel on each... well, you get the idea.

I have used Tivoli as well. Quite honestly I don't think it's much better, although it has the (dis?)advantage that it is not MQ specific and so is part of the wider monitoring world.

Sorry if this is a bit rambling and I relly don't want to dump on QPasa too much - as I say, for certain environments I'm sure it will do the trick nicely.

Cheers,
Paul

 

[joselo]

Try with Support Pac MO71, is free and ease.

 

[pmeekin]

Support pac MO71 is an excellent administration tool but I don't think it is suitable as an enterprise monitoring tool.

Cheers,
Paul