What is IBM MQ?
Previously known as MQ Series, IBM MQ is an enterprise grade messaging system used to transfer data between application services using queuing middleware that has several modes of operation – point-to-point, publish/subscribe and file transfer. Additionally, applications can publish messages to many subscribers over multicast. IBM MQ Monitoring requires the ability to identify any IBM MQ instances, collect performance information from the platform and data about the queues and queue managers.
With MQ, if a message can’t be delivered immediately, it’s secured in a queue, where it waits until delivery is assured. IBM MQ acts as a shock absorber between applications in asynchronous messaging environments. If there’s network or application disruption, it holds messages in special queues until everything is running.
Visualization of pub/sub architecture courtesy of IBM MQ developer website
Monitoring IBM MQ using Instana
When the Instana Agent is deployed onto a host that contains IBM MQ, the Instana IBM MQ sensor is automatically configured and attached to MQ. Instana then immediately begins monitoring IBM MQ performance metrics to ensure smooth messaging is maintained. Instana gathers IBM MQ performance metrics for Clusters, Listeners, Topics, Queue Managers, Queues, and Channels all with 1 second granularity so you never miss a spike that indicates a potential performance problem.
Built in IBM MQ Health Signatures
Instana maintains a curated KnowledgeBase of health signatures for all monitored platforms, including IBM MQ. The KnowledgeBase is continuously evaluated against the incoming metrics and are used to alert on issues or incidents depending on user impact and severity. Built-in events trigger issues or incidents based on failing health signatures on entities, and custom events trigger issues or incidents based on defined thresholds of any given entity’s individual metrics.
IBM MQ Queue Manager
| Event | Description | Metric |
| Queue Manager number of connections. | Checks whether there are no connections currently on Queue Manager. | Connection count (connectionCount) |
| Queue Manager status. | Checks whether Queue Manager is healthy and not in quiesced state. | Queue Manager Status (status) |
IBM MQ Queue
| Event | Description | Metric |
| Queue oldest message. | Checks whether there are messages on the queue older than threshold value. | Oldest message on queue (oldestMessage) |
| Queue depth diff. | Checks whether queue depth is approaching max queue depth. | Queue depth (queueDepth) and max queue depth (maxQueueDepth) |
IBM MQ Channel
| Event | Description | Metric |
| Channel status. | Checks whether the channel is in a healthy state. | Channel status (channelStatus) |
IBM MQ Listener
| Event | Description | Metric |
| Listener status. | Checks whether the listener is in a healthy state. | Listener status (listenerStatus) |
Learn more about configuration and setup with documentation for monitoring IBM MQ.
