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November 14, 2008
Three tools to monitor your Websphere MQ environment

By Anand Ganesan | Filed under: App. Performance Management and Monitoring and Websphere MQ

The value propositions of monitoring a Websphere MQ environment (or the Queue Manager network) are mentioned below:

1. Provide business service visibility i.e. how many cross sell offers (messages) were processed?

2. Precise measurement of the Queue Manager throughput for capacity and performance planning and architecture fine tuning.

3. Helps in troubleshooting issues related to Queue Manager.

This posting discusses three tools that can monitor a Websphere MQ environment. Unlike Java application performance management tools, these tools try to be different from each other.

1. QPasa from MQSoftware is arguably the market leader in this segment and probably the first MQ monitoring solution. QPasa supports monitoring metrics of two kinds, real time and historical. QPasa is based on “publish and subscribe” architecture, thereby enabling parallel processing of performance messages. This architecture makes QPasa an appropriate choice for monitoring high volume MQ environments. QPasa offers rich features such as custom dashboard reporting providing business visibility into messages processed and configuration management. However, it requires agents to be deployed on the servers hosting the queue manager in order to instrument them. On the downside, QPasa requires a high learning curve.

2. QFlex from Netflix uses a simple architecture of near real time metrics collection based on Websphere MQ’s reset statistics. QFlex is agent-less requiring no configuration or deployment overhead. One can start using the tool in less than an hour. QFlex offers features such as change management, queue browse utility that can be used to move messages from one queue to the other or in maintaining poison messages. Netflexity provides excellent technical support. However, QFlex does not offer report customization.

3. Statwatch originally from Reconda Software, was later acquired by MQSoftware, provides historical monitoring of message traffic, message tracking thereby enabling measurement of time taken for message traversal across queues. Statwatch relies on Websphere MQ API exits that are deployed as agents on the queue managers that need to be monitored.

If you have used any other product please share your thoughts/experience in the comments.