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MQ Queue Depth Events monitoring

What are MQ Queue Depth Events?

A wide variety of metrics for the IBM MQ queue manager exist such as documented in the IBM Documentation. However, these metrics do not currently cover the queue or the topic level attributes such as the queue depth, that is the number of messages on the queue. This data are valuable for more successful monitoring.

Enabling monitoring

To operate correctly, the queues must not become full as, if they do, the applications can no longer put messages on the queue that they specify. Although the message is not lost if this occurs, a full queue can cause considerable inconvenience. With IBM MQ Prometheus monitor, a wide variety of statistics about that queue manager are published.

The following information describes how to enable Prometheus monitoring agent that connects to an IBM MQ server. This monitor is based on the open-source project MQ Metrics Sample which provides the monitor mq_prometheus to be compiled and the image mq-metric-prometheus to be built.

Together, they will expose metrics about the following queue depth events which permit to understand what is happening in the queues:

  • Queue Depth High events Indicate that the queue depth has increased to a predefined threshold called the Queue Depth High limit.
  • Queue Depth Low events Indicate that the queue depth has decreased to a predefined threshold called the Queue Depth Low limit.
  • Queue Full events Indicate that the queue has reached its maximum depth, that is, the queue is full.

More details are available in the IBM MQ Queue Depth Events documentation.

Building MQ Metric Pod

The following commands show how to build the MQ Metrics Pod which contains the monitor mq_prometheus.

# Clone repository locally
git clone https://github.com/ibm-messaging/mq-metric-samples.git


# Build code and image
cd mq-metric-samples/scripts
./buildRuntime.sh mq_prometheus


# Retrieve current latest image tag
DIST_TAG_LATEST=`git tag -l | sort | tail -1 | sed "s/^v//g"`

Pushing Image

The following commands are illustrating how to tag and push the MQ Metric Pod to a typical Container Registry.

# Tagging image
docker tag mq-metric-prometheus:$DIST_TAG_LATEST ${server-name}.jfrog.io/{repo-name}/mq-metric-prometheus:$DIST_TAG_LATEST




# Push images to registry
docker push --all-tags ${server-name}.jfrog.io/{repo-name}/mq-metric-prometheus:$DIST_TAG_LATEST

Deploy

To enable the deployment of the MQ Metric Pod, the values global.mq.metrics.enabled and global.mq.metrics.additionalMetrics are required to be toggled to true.

Additionally, the values mqserver.metricsImage.library, mqserver.metricsImage.name, and mqserver.metricsImage.tag are required to be set with the details of the image registry containing your IBM MQ Queue Depth Events image.

More details about the configuration values are provided in the Configuration Reference under the MQ Metrics topic.

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