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| bigdavem |
 Posted: Mon Sep 17, 2001 4:03 pm Post subject: |
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Acolyte
Joined: 16 Sep 2001
Posts: 69
Location: Sydney, Australia
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I'm writing a middleware strategy document for my company at the moment and part of that involves making recommendations on monitoring and security tools (of which we currently have none).
My main interests in monitoring tools are end-to-end performance monitoring, message tracing and the ability to monitor queue depths/channel status etc in order to warn us quickly of potential problems.
When it comes to security, I'm interested in confidentiality, validation and authentication.
I'm particularly keen to know what tools are out there. Any quick evaluations would also be good, but I'm probably going to end up test driving them myself anyway. |
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| bduncan |
| Posted: Tue Sep 18, 2001 12:00 am Post subject: |
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Padawan
Joined: 11 Apr 2001
Posts: 1554
Location: Silicon Valley
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Well, there are plenty of companies out there ready to give you monitoring and security for your MQSeries system; for a pretty big hunk of change in most cases... But here's a quick run down of the major players (feel free to flame me if I miss any 
Candle - These guys can solve both of your problems. In terms of monitoring, they offer a full suite of products, and another plus, they are available for most platforms - including mainframe. Using the Candle Management Workstation (fancy words for GUI interface) you can build policies that you wish Candle to alert on, and you can even tie the alerting system into other products, like Tivoli. The workstation interface is pretty clunky in my opinion, but its gotten better in the latest version. In terms of your security concerns, Candle offers MQSecure, again, for most platforms. Keep in mind that the number of vendors offering products for MQSeries security are few and far in between and Candle is probably the biggest name to do so. MQSecure does a lot of cool things like forcing channels to handshake when attempting to connect, and repeatedly checking that a given channel has the authority to be sending messages to the destination queue manager. It also offers encryption, allowing you to encrypt your MQSeries messages using RSA encryption. It does this via a channel-exit, but they also provide an API that allows you to do interesting things like partial encryption of your messages, i.e., encrypt the part of the message that has the customer's credit card number, but let everything else be plain-text.
MQSoftware - Their product is called Q!Pasa, and it's got a much better interface than Candle's; I'm partial to web-based interfaces (because I don't want to have to install a workstation client on every machine I wish to monitor the system from) and Q!Pasa lets me be anywhere and still be able to monitor MQSeries. MQSoftware also has pretty good customer support, and they have excellent training programs from what I've heard...
contact admin - Probably the most technologically superior of all the monitoring tools I've seen. It does pretty much everything the competitors do, and much more. The web-based interface is very intuitive (unlike Candle's sometimes obscure one) and the java-based tool that lets you view your MQ "universe" graphically is really slick. Unfortunately, the main drawback with contact admin is their support and biz dev... If they can enhance those, I'm sure they could win some major market share...
Tivoli - If you wanna stick with all-IBM, then go with Tivoli. The major strength is that the alerting ties in to the overall Tivoli alerting system, which is one of the best around. But in terms of specific MQSeries functionality and monitoring capabilities, it's definitely not as far-reaching as the others....
So that's my two cents, for whatever it's worth (hmm... why does everyone always say "whatever it's worth" after they just got done telling you it's worth "two cents"? food for thought I guess
Again, these are just my personal opinions... Of course, vendors of the aforementioned products can feel free to prove me wrong - I'm always up for beta-testing 
_________________
Brandon Duncan
IBM Certified MQSeries Specialist
MQSeries.net forum moderator |
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| RogerLacroix |
| Posted: Tue Sep 18, 2001 4:59 pm Post subject: |
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Jedi Knight
Joined: 15 May 2001
Posts: 3253
Location: London, ON Canada
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Hi,
Before you contact vendors, MQ Administrators need to define what they want from the monitoring tool.
Generally speaking, MQ Admins or Sys Admins for MQSeries need to look at 3 areas of monitoring & management for MQSeries:
- monitoring of status, events, depth, channels, etc..
- configuration of MQ objects
- security of messages, exits, users/groups, file system, etc...
Now you give each of these items a score or weighting.
i.e.
- monitoring score = 10
- configuration score = 7
- security score = 2
(Hey, don't give me a hard time about security. I've been to lots of companies where it is an after thought. )
Personally, I put configuration at the same level as monitoring because a good configuration tool can save hundreds (or thousands) of hours defining MQ environments.
Next, go to the vendors and see how each handles the different items. i.e. some monitoring tools do not have a configuration tool while others do not include any security features.
Now, see which solution best matches your requirements. Here's a word of warning: All vendors will claim to be the best fit for your organization!!!
Hope that helps.
later
Roger...
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| TonyD |
| Posted: Tue Sep 18, 2001 6:03 pm Post subject: |
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Knight
Joined: 15 May 2001
Posts: 540
Location: New Zealand
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| BMC might feel a bit left out!?....their MQ and MQSI offerings are fairly thorough. |
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| bigdavem |
| Posted: Tue Sep 18, 2001 10:28 pm Post subject: |
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Acolyte
Joined: 16 Sep 2001
Posts: 69
Location: Sydney, Australia
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Thanks for that.
Our MQ administration is all outsourced, so I'm not as concerned about configuration tools and the like. I guess I'm coming from an application programmer's point of view. My main interests are in finding out how long requests are taking to get from A to B, tracking down where a particular message is at any point in time and identifying problems quickly (ie elevated queue depths, dead channels etc).
I spoke to our Candle rep a while ago and he wasn't aware of any packages that could trace an individual message without having to make code changes. TransactionVision from Bristol Technology seems to do this by grabbing information from the API and sending it to a central server, but to use their product you need to install "eSensors" on each MQ platform and unfortunately there are no eSensors available for some of our more obscure machines eg hp3000. Does anyone know if any of the other packages can trace individual messages easily? |
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| lduffy |
| Posted: Fri Sep 28, 2001 5:39 am Post subject: |
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Newbie
Joined: 27 Sep 2001
Posts: 4
Location: North Carolina
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I work for BMC with the Patrol for MQ product. Within our tool we provide a MTM a message transit monitor that measures the time it takes for a message to travel to a queue and reply back. Within the tool one can set up the desired size of the message they want to tranmit and are prompted for the desired transmissin path. For more info on the tool go to http://www.bmc.com and find Patrol for MQ Operator. we also offer a tool called patrol for MQ administrator that allows application programmers and administartors the abiltiy to manage and matipulate MQSeries Objects. Please feel free to email me if you need assistance
_________________
Larry Duffy
Principle Software Consultant
BMC Software |
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| eh1921-sbc |
| Posted: Wed May 22, 2002 6:43 am Post subject: BMC: MQ Operator |
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Newbie
Joined: 09 May 2002
Posts: 2
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We use BMC/Patrol's: "MQ Operator" for monitoring our MQSeries environment on MVS/OS390, Unix, and NT. It provides a GUI tool for looking at each server, and each QMGR on each server. It automatically discovers all queues, channels, etc. It provides a historical graph to track the DQepth. It provides alarm capabilities - you set the threshold for QDepth, and when the threshold is exceeded, then an alarm/event is generated. We send our events out to support staff via pages and email. The GUI tracks all objects (Local Queues, Alias queues, Model queues, Remote queues, XMIT queues, DLQ, Clusters, Channels - including CLNTCONN, CLUSRCVR, CLUSSDR, RCVR, RQSTR, SDR, SVR, SVRCONN, etc.
We have successfully detected (via monitoring) QDepth thresholds exceeded, and notified support groups hundreds (maybe thousands) of times, allowing the support groups to fix the application, or whatever problem may be causing the queues to backup.
The GUI provides a means of Managing your MQ environment. Just for messages alone, the GUI allows you to peform the following functions for messages: copy, move, delete, unload, requeue, modify, and display. For Channels, the GUI allows you to start and stop the channel. For Channel attributes, you can view, change, copy, and delete. For the QMGR itself, the list is so long I won't even start on all the functions.
For what it is worth, I do NOT work for BMC, and I do not own any BMC stock.
BMC Patrol's MQ Operator has been a great product to support. Their technical support staff is knowledgable and helpful. Quick to respond. Knowldege about traces, and logfiles, AMQERR files, and FDC files, etc.
I have supported the Tivoli TME product in years past in our distributed environment. It is an OK product. It was far too labor intensive - on the TEC rules side of things. I prefer BMC Patrol, but that is my preference for my own reasons. If someone prefers a different vendor - that is fine with me. I am not looking to debate vendors. I only wanted to state that BMC/Patrol's MQ Operator has been a stable, thorough, complete product, that has met our needs for numerous unix, NT, and OS/390 systems that are running MQSeries.
eric |
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| cicsman |
| Posted: Wed May 22, 2002 10:03 am Post subject: |
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Novice
Joined: 06 May 2002
Posts: 20
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I have more years messaging experience than I care to remember. Here's my take on things.
I have seen just about all the monitoring toold available on the market (and a few other that didn't make it).
In my opinion contact admin's offering is the easiset to use and to get going quickly. Their support is pretty good. I've had very few problems with it and their products tend to work as advertised.
BMC also offer a reasonable product but it tends to be complex to get it working correctly in some environments. I have had prblems with it when running on a mixture of platforms. Their support is average - sometimes good sometimes lousy
Candle are trading on past reputations. Their Omegamon tools were the best in their day but I would give serious consideration to whether you really want to buy a monitoring tool from a Company that has stated publically that they see their future elsewhere and not in monitoring. Also they have had several very heavy layoffs in the last year that I know about (the last 2 months ago) and I have to question whether they now have the technical support and knowledge to help you when things get sticky. |
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| dgolding |
| Posted: Wed May 22, 2002 10:30 pm Post subject: |
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Yatiri
Joined: 16 May 2001
Posts: 668
Location: Switzerland
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Here's my $0.02 - in a medium to large shop, it probably doesn't matter what the MQ support team want, as there (usually) will be some sort of central enterprise management already - and you have to fit in with that.
The upside is that there is probably a good deal of expertise on the product already - you need only worry about the product (MQ) specific bits. The downside is that you will probably have little control on the monitoring product as a whole. It's a bit like turning up at a barbecue with your vegeburgers to grill  |
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| gcrimy |
| Posted: Sun May 26, 2002 5:03 pm Post subject: Another option.. |
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Newbie
Joined: 16 Dec 2001
Posts: 7
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BigDave,
If I were you I'd go back to your Candle representative and ask him why he didn't mention to you the CASP infrastructure that they provide. CASP stands for the Candle Application Services Pack and takes all the hard work away from auditing, tracking, reporting, configuring, and coding etc messaging middleware. Basically it’s an infrastructure wrapper that makes AMI look very incomplete..... It sounds like it would be just what you’re looking for..... Strange your local Candle rep didn't put you onto that, vendors are usually trying to put anything on the table.... Definitely worth a look...
That’s my $0.01... |
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| blowbeat |
| Posted: Mon May 27, 2002 11:58 pm Post subject: Candle's GUI |
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Apprentice
Joined: 02 Apr 2002
Posts: 49
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| Candle has Omegamon XE which has something called CandleNet Portal(CNP) that offers a web based GUI. I haven't worked with it (yet), so cannot comment on it... |
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| arinduer |
| Posted: Wed Jun 26, 2002 6:50 am Post subject: |
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Acolyte
Joined: 13 Aug 2001
Posts: 50
Location: Phuket, Thailand
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And for the smaller MQ shops, or for those with little or no budget for 3rd party monitoring, just have one of your UNIX savvy guys write a cron to grep for certain MQ(or application) processes and to have it automatically send you an SMS, page, or email when something is not right--ok, i'm assuming two things: that you have unix administrators and that you're running mq on unix. hopefully this is never the case; I'd never want to be in the position to support MQ when there isn't a proper monitoring solution set in place.
--arinduer (eric)... |
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| mrlinux |
| Posted: Wed Jun 26, 2002 7:14 am Post subject: |
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Grand Master
Joined: 14 Feb 2002
Posts: 1261
Location: Detroit,MI USA
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if you are using just NT, then download and setup cygwin (unix emulation for NT) www.cygwin.com
_________________
Jeff
IBM Certified Developer MQSeries
IBM Certified Specialist MQSeries
IBM Certified Solutions Expert MQSeries |
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