WebSphere MQ Monitoring & Management

Sentra MQ provides a collaborative, team-based approach to infrastructure management: middleware specialists, database administrators and applications developers can each be provided with tailored views of their respective areas of interest, and can work together to resolve issues and maximize business process performance. Complete life-cycle management that speeds up development and deployment of your integration and implementation.

• IBM MQ WebSphere (MQ Series) monitoring and management for version 6 and version 7 and also HP NonStop WebSphere MQ version 5 and 5.3 (5.3.1.4). 
   
• View real-time information on your WebSphere MQ Workflow processes with Sentra Hypervisor. 
   
• Granular control - Provides the ability to drill down into the application and messaging layers to determine cause and problem resolution issues.
   
• Gives you the information you need to optimize process performance. Evaluate productivity of key business processes trends against your benchmarks.
   
• Sentra Dashboard enables you to see real-time performance and availability information from your desired vantage points - from the top level to the underlying causes.
   
• The highly configurable nature of Sentra enables you to respond rapidly to changing business requirements and market conditions. A management and monitoring strategy for new business services can be developed rapidly.
   
• Create custom views and dashboards based on user roles, such as Line-of-Business Managers, Integration Specialists and Technology Administrators, to deliver the information they require.
   
• Certified integration with enterprise management tools such as Tivoli and HP OpenView; easily integrate into other systems management frameworks.
   
• Historical reporting and analysis tools help you identify short-term trends to avoid problems and also perform long-term capacity planning.
   
• Set customized alerts based on business conditions; real-time notification via dashboard, email, pager or mobile phone.
   
• Easy to install and deploy for both development and production environments.
   
• Gives the most extensive support for transaction-centric applications by monitoring transactions that are both message-based and non-message based.
   

Sentra MQ allows you to easily track individual transactions as they pass through Key Business Processes.

Real-Time Transaction Monitoring enables business users to immediately see the impact of transaction delivery failures or system bottle-necks.

 
“You’ve invested in WebSphere MQ - now protect your investment”

Sentra MQ can minimise the risks involved in running a complex WebSphere Middleware installation.

By utilising real-time monitoring of the individual systems that are connected by WebSphere, support costs are reduced and down time is minimised.

Dynamically configure real-time views of alert and performance information.

Sentra MQ's web console supports the concept of real-time digital dashboards. Each dashboard can contain one or more real-time graphical displays of any data that Sentra MQ is configured to capture. Each graph can be configured to support drilldown; for example a user can highlight a bar in a bar graph and zoom in to a more detailed breakdown of information e.g. message system traffic or CPU usage by process.

The web console provides a dashboard configuration tool, enabling the user to design their own dashboards and specify the layout of each dashboard, including the types of graphs, the relative sizes of each panel and any required drilldown functionality. These dashboards offer flexible reporting of any data captured by Sentra MQ, combined with the potential to view this information from anywhere in the world, subject to the availability of an internet link and a web browser.

The example depicts a Sentra dashboard, which has been configured to show the average transaction processing time across an entire network of payment systems, connected via MQ. A user can drilldown into the dashboard to highlight the slowest transactions at key times of the day. Further drilldown is possible to view an individual transaction's properties. 

Sentra MQ can monitor MQ Queue Managers, Queues and channels in real-time. Users are notified when MQ queues fail, or are no longer responding. Full event and situation details are presented.

Sentra MQ gathers its data from many sources in addition to purely MQ subsystems. A slowing down of an MQ queue may be as a result of lack of system resources (e.g. as a result of inadequate capacity planning), poor system tuning, other application failures. Sentra MQ’s key differentiation is that it provides drilldown beyond other MQ monitoring products, i.e. into detailed performance and system metrics. (Sentra MQ provides its own enterprise manager but can also co-exist with the one you may have today).

Sentra MQ alerts you immediately when a condition occurs that might affect your business. Sentra MQ can be configured to  automatically resolve common problems, such as restarting halted MQ queues or channels, or quarantining certain messages based upon a user-defined criteria (e.g. a payment value).

Unlike other enterprise management systems, rules are automatically deployed to all relevant systems; there is no need to physically deploy a new rule onto each monitored platform. A high degree of flexibility in rule configuration is possible, facilitating intelligent problem escalation.

Once a user-defined rule has been violated, a number of actions can be invoked in order to notify appropriate individuals and systems and/or to automate problem resolution routines. These include SMS Messages, Email, GUI Alert (through unique service topology view), SNMP Traps, Automatic Process Re-start, Batch Jobs and Script Files.

Alerts can be escalated to more general enterprise management systems such as HP Operations Center (formerly HP OpenView Operations), BMC Performance Manager and TIVOLI via certified plugins. The alerts can also be forwarded to problem management systems such as HP ServiceDesk and REMEDY.

Sentra MQ provides the user with user-configurable tools to control and manage MQ messaging infrastructures. MQ Queues and channels can, naturally, be configured and controlled. Additional tools exist to deploy software to other platforms, and to carry out common administration tasks, e.g. rebooting a platform. New tasks can easily be defined and added to the existing Sentra MQ framework.

In addition to the Dashboard reporting mechanisms, Sentra MQ provides the user with extensive additional reporting capabilities.

This can be used for monitoring and analyzing real time and historical performance information and for monitoring e-mail or middleware messaging system traffic and long-term trends.

Sentra MQ comes with a number of predefined management reports based on the industry-standard Microsoft Reporting Services package. These reports allow the Sentra MQ data to be displayed as meaningful management information. SLA analysis, capacity planning, charge-back and billing are just some of the many uses that can be made of this.

Through Microsoft Reporting Services, user-defined reports can be written and then launched from the Sentra MQ Console. This enables users to write reports based on virtually any data captured by the Sentra MQ server. Furthermore, automatic scheduling along with publishing capabilities allow the reporting process to be automated, e.g. monthly SLA reports can be published on an intranet web site or e-mailed to a business manager without any need for user intervention.

Reports can be also be exported to a variety of formats, including CSV (comma separated field), Excel, Word, rich text and e-mail, for subsequent manipulation.

Summary of Reporting Component :

• Provides single point of data and reporting capability across entire messaging system.

• SLA measurement, messaging statistics, capacity planning data reporting.

• Automatic scheduling of reports.

• Web publishing.

• Configurable Real-time dashboard displays, available from a web console.

• Timely and accurate report production facilitates appropriate use of resources.

• Along with effective capacity planning. This leads to significant efficiency savings as system resource can be more efficiently employed.

Sentra MQ Demonstration :

Name	Demonstration	View
Sentra MQ (Flash File - 1.2 Mb)	ITL’s WebSphere MQ extensions for Sentra to allow a WebSphere MQ network to be monitored and managed from a single console, regardless of the platforms in use. This demonstration gives an outline of the features of Sentra MQ.