What commands or queries are used by the websphere_mq probe?

Products

• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (Nimsoft / UIM)
• CA Unified Infrastructure Management On-Premise (Nimsoft / UIM)
• CA Unified Infrastructure Management SaaS (Nimsoft / UIM)

Issue/Introduction

In order to understand the metrics for the websphere_mq probe we would like to know the backend queries or commands executed by the probe to retrieve the metric data.

Environment

• IBM Websphere MQ 9.x
• DX UIM - Any version

Cause

• Guidance
• Commands used

Resolution

• The websphere_mq probe uses IBM MQ programmable command format (PCF) commands to get information from IBM MQ .

• Per IBM, PCF commands and their replies are not in a text format that you can read.  

• For example, The Inquire Queue Manager Status (MQCMD_INQUIRE_Q_MGR_STATUS) PCF command inquires about the status of the local queue manager.

• The response of this command is used to calculate the below metrics:

  QOS_QUEUE_MANAGER_CHANNEL_INITIATOR_STATUS: Read the value of the attribute 1232 from response 

  QOS_QUEUE_MANAGER_COMMAND_SERVER_STATUS: Read the value of the attribute 1233  from response

  QOS_QUEUE_MANAGER_UP_TIME: Read the value of the attribute QueueManagerUpTime  from response

• Most values in the probe are retrieved in this manner, where the metric corresponds to a specific attribute number in a response that can potentially contain thousands of attributes.

• There is no way to validate the output in a human-readable format -- that is what the probe itself is designed to do, retrieving the non-human-readable details from IBM Websphere MQ and presenting them in a useful way (through QoS metrics).

Additional Information

More information about PCF commands is available from IBM.