MQ Series Monitoring tools

[lriverahonores]

Hi, sometimes sender channels go down because of losing the sequence number. Then the next step is to reset the channel manually.

How can the channel be reset automatically?? Is there any tool that helps to alert you if a channel goes down or get inactive??

Please help,

Regards,

LRH

 

[mqonnet]

Well, there would surely be some around in the market that would trigger a pager message or something like that. But of course that would come with a cost.

As an alternative you could develop a home grown app(of course for free ) that would do this for you.

Whenever a channel goes down or has some issues it raises an event. If you have the appropriate events enabled, then you would get a message for it in the respective event queue. Write an app that always waits and reads off this queue and find out what type of error it is. Once you figure it out, take action as your design needs.

Good luck.



Cheers
KK

 

[kevinf2349]

A message is written to the SYSTEM.ADMIN.CHANNEL.EVENT queue when the channel stops. You could monitor this queue. I am sure there are tools out there to do this. We wrote our own as part of the trigger monitor program for z/OS.

It is for the very reason you specified (having to manually reset if things go wrong) that I usually trigger all my channels and have a pretty short (10 minute) disconnect interval. There are very good reasons to do it this way, not least of which is reducing the need for manual intervention. The trade off is that the first message takes slightly longer to send (while the channel starts) but then I could make an arguement that if response is a priority, then having to manually reset and start a channel takes maginitudes longer than the inital delay caused by triggering.

Hope this helps

 

[lriverahonores]

Thank you very much for this help! I didn't know that every time that channel stops, a message is written to the SYSTEM.ADMIN.CHANNEL.EVENT.

But how do you trigger a channel??? Could you send me a little example please?

Because of this I have a doubt , the default depth of the SYSTEM.ADMIN.CHANNEL.EVENT is 3000. In what time does the queue go to zero? What happens if the depth of queue becomes 3000??

Back to the issue, for example right now I have a sender channel that is inactive in my MQ SERVER but SYSTEM.ADMIN.CHANNEL.EVENT does not show a message about this event? How can I decodify the messages that there are in this queue?? For example I could read this queue through a java program and depends on the message I could send an email to alert about a channel problem (channel in status retrying or inactive).

Where can I found information about this?

Thank you,

LRH

 

[kevinf2349]

Triggering a channel is described in the MQSeries Intercommunication Guide and (I believe) in the Application Programming Guide.

The SYSTEM.ADMIN.CHANNEL.EVENT queue will not normally get cleared out without user intervention. (You can clear the queue in the normal manner if you wish to). What happens when it reaches its maximum depth?....exactly the same as happens for any other queue. A return code is handed back to the application program (in this case the Qmgr itself). I believe that the queue manager will then just disable the events until it can add messages to the queue again.

Just out of interest...what type of channel is it? and what platform are you using. I have a 'channel monitor' program but it will only run on z/OS(or any 370 system).

 

[lriverahonores]

The channel is sender and I installed WebSphere MQ 5.3 over Linux for xSeries.

I have read the "WebSphere MQ Intercommunication" book and learned a little about triggers. One question : What happens if I have a trigger to start a channel when a message is sent but just in that moment there is a communication problem that doesn't allow the channel to start?? Does this problem send a message to event queue??

On the other hand , about Events , that's interesting point, I only want to send an e-mail to an administrator in the case of the channel is inactive or retrying. But when I read this queue, the messages does not show an understanding message. What about this??? please help.

Thanks.

 

[kevinf2349]

I am not 100% sure about the event message getting written if the channel fails to start because of a fail at the exact moment that the trigger 'pops', but I am pretty sure that it will write write an event for when the channel goes into 'retrying'.

If you need to look at the format of the event message it should be in the MQCFT-EVENT copybook.