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This article shows you how to use a simple, downloadable, web-based monitoring tool for IBM®
WebSphere® to provide visualization and custom alert conditions for WebSphere MQ objects,
including channels, listeners, topics, queues, and queue managers.
Editor's note (April 2016): This article is updated with a new Downloads section that contains
a zip file of the IBM WebSphere MQ monitoring tool, documentation, and scripts. The original
article hosted these resources on Github.
Introduction
This article shows you how to use a simple web-based monitoring tool for IBM® WebSphere®
MQ available in the Download section. The article targets WebSphere MQ administrators and
users who would like to take advantage of the monitoring tool features, such as visualization of
WebSphere MQ system health and custom alert conditions for WebSphere MQ objects, including
queues, topics, channels, listeners, and queue managers.
Statistics for monitored MQ objects and overall system status are displayed in real-time charts on
a dashboard:
Architecture
• Back-end: Java™ standard web application
• Front-end: Dojo based web UI.
• Database: IBM DB2®, embedded Derby (the default), MySQL®, and Oracle®.
• Development: The monitoring tools was developed using the Dojo Toolkit.
Deployment
This monitoring tool is easy to install, because it is implemented as a standard Java web
application. You can easily deploy it on any Java EE application server or any Java servlet engine.
After deployment, the monitoring application is up and running.
Prerequisites
Make sure you have the following software installed before installing the WebSphere MQ
monitoring tool.
• Install a Java EE application server, such as WebSphere Application Server for Developers,
or a servlet engine, such as Apache Tomcat, that supports Servlet 2.5 or later.
Installation
Deploy the monitoring application as a WAR file to a Java EE application Server or servlet engine.
For customization, you unpack the WAR file, modify the configuration files as needed, and
redeploy.
Configuration
To customize settings, unpack the WAR file, find the config.properties file in the WEB-INF
directory, and update application-specific settings according to the comments inside this
configuration file. Edit the file carefully, because invalid settings may prevent the monitoring
application from starting up.
The monitor uses an embedded Apache Derby database by default. To configure the database
or use a different one, unpack the WAR file, find the jdbc.properties file in the WEB-INF directory,
and edit the configuration file to switch to your preferred database. You will also need to drop the
corresponding database driver JAR file to the WEB-INF/lib directory. The monitor uses Apache
OpenJPA as a persistence provider, so any database supported by Apache OpenJPA should work.
The database schema is automatically generated when the monitor starts up. For heavy data
loads, consider switching to a more powerful database such as MySQL, because Apache Derby
may not work very well when many monitors are running with large volumes of data are being
collected.
To log out, click Username at the upper right of the homepage, click Sign out from the dropdown
list, and then click OK to confirm. If you do not log out and do not use the tool for an extended
period, it will log you out automatically and ask you to log in again.
To change your password, click Username at the upper right, select Edit profile from the
dropdown list, enter your current password and new password, and the click Save to confirm the
change.
Creating a connection
Click the Connection tab to monitor a queue manager.
Connection tab
Click New QM Connection to create a connection which stands for a connection to a queue
manager.
• Server Host -- Host of the Queue Manager you are trying to connect.
• Server Port -- Listening port of the Queue Manager you are trying to connect.
• Server Connection Channel -- Server connection channel of the Queue Manager.
• MQ User ID -- Authorized MCA User ID for the server connection channel.
• Description -- Basic description of the connection.
QueueManager tab
Once the queue manager is connected, the Monitors tab is available. And if the MQTT service of
the queue manager is Available, which means it is configured and started, the MQTT tab will be
available.
Creating a monitor
Click the selected connection to open a new tab named after the connection name, and then open
the Monitors tab:
Monitors tab
The monitor metadata includes the following information in order to monitor an MQ object:
Examples
Queue alert rule 1
Rule -- Warn(|(currentQDepth>1000)(openInputCount>100)), error(&(currentQDepth>30000)
(openInputCount>200))
Anther way to create a monitor is to right-click on the selected connection in the left navigation of
Connection tab, and the click Create Monitor from the dropdown menu.
Managing monitors
If create monitor succeeded, all monitors will be shown in the grid of the Monitors tab.
Monitors management
Select a monitor and click Activate to start the monitor or Deactivate to stop the monitor.
Toolbar actions:
• If a filter object or string is changed, or a filter is enabled or disabled, click Search to refresh
the table below. Clicking Refresh only refreshes the latest search result.
• Each request can have up to 100 results, which are paged at the bottom of this tab.
Message Tab
This step is the same as Add/Remove monitors in Simple Dashboard. Select a topic from the
Topic dropdown list. The topic monitor will be activated automatically. The topic measurement is
published messages count, so when sending message to the selected topic, the monitor will be
updated accordingly.
Select a destination, type text in the text box, and click Send. If the message is sent successfully,
the history record will be displayed in the box.
Creating a dashboard
A dashboard is the visual display of a set of monitors. A dashboard can apply a display pattern for
certain use cases. Currently, simple and sender-receiver patterns are supported. With the pattern,
the dashboard can display the monitors in a more appropriate way that better fits the business
scenario:
Create dashboard
Simple dashboard
In this kind of dashboard, you can add arbitrary monitors:
Simple Dashboard
If the monitor is inactive, click Activate in the center or at top right corner of each monitor.
Monitor chart:
Monitor title
The dashboard supports two kinds of charts: Line Chart and Area Chart. The Area Chart is
preferred for monitoring measurements such as channelStatus and listenerStatus.
Area Chart
Line Chart
Detailed information
The table at the bottom displays the detailed information for the monitor, refreshed every five
minutes. Click on the scroll button on the right to view more information.
SenderReceiver dashboard
The SenderReceiver Dashboard monitors a topical messaging scenario, with messages being sent
from a transmit queue via sender-receiver channels, and going to the target queue, which normally
is a local queue. When you monitor a transmit queue, you may also want to know the status of the
sender/receiver channel and the target queue that will receive the messages. The SenderReceiver
Dashboard shows you what's going on behind the scenes:
SenderReceiver Dashboard
Select monitors from the dropdown list and add or remove them for the specific position in the
dashboard as indicated above. Otherwise the SenderReceiver Dashboard is the same as Simple
Dashboard.
Alerts
The Alert tab collects all Alert messages generated by the active monitors, based on the Alert
conditions defined during monitor creation:
Alert Tooltip
The Tooltip displays the total of alert messages. It updates every 50 seconds.
Alert Tab
Conclusion
This article showed you how to use a simple, downloadable, web-based monitoring tool for
WebSphere MQ to provide visualization and custom alert conditions for WebSphere MQ objects,
including channels, listeners, topics, queues, and queue managers.
Related topics IBM MQ Version 8.0 documentation IBM products: IBM MQ Forum:
WebSphere MQ IBM MQ and WebSphere MQ library
Downloads
Description Name Size
WebSphere MQ Monitoring tool wmq-monitoring-0.2.2.zip 35.9MB
ZiHan Tang
ZiHan Tang is a Software Engineer on the WebSphere MQ team at the IBM China
Development Lab in Beijing. Her technical expertise includes Web UI development
and testing. You can contact ZiHan at zhtang@cn.ibm.com.
Bin Zhang
Bin Zhang is a Software Engineer of the WebSphere MQ team at the IBM China
Development Lab in Beijing. Hia technical expertise includes Java EE development,
WebSphere MQ monitoring, and MQTT. You can contact Bin at zhbinbj@cn.ibm.com.