Mark Taylor's Blog

OTel Context Propagation: part 5 – Notes on the MQ Tracing Exit

Previous articles in this series have shown OpenTelemetry (OTel) Context propagation for MQ applications in different languages. You should read the first article for an introduction and explanation of the scenarios and problems that need solutions.

This entry has a couple of additional observations I had when trying different configurations with the MQ Tracing Exit (the Instana-developed component) that’s part of the MQ product.

OTel Context Propagation for MQ Applications: part 4 – Python

Previous articles in this series have shown OpenTelemetry (OTel) Context propagation for Node.js, Go, Java and C/C++ MQ applications. You should read the first article for an introduction and explanation of the scenarios and problems that need solutions.

This entry discusses Python MQ applications.

End of a platform

I saw this article a couple of days ago about the end-of-life for HP-UX. While MQ has not produced a new version for that operating system for a number of years (the last release was 9.0, around 2017), it’s still a bit sad to see.

MQ Monitoring: using queue manager STATISTICS events

The sample monitoring packages here use a variety of techniques to collect metrics from the queue manager. The most recent release (v5.7.0) adds a further alternative approach.

MQ with Spring Boot 4

The first pre-release version of Spring Boot 4 (milestone 1) has just been published. What does it mean for MQ’s support of the Spring Boot environment?

Enabling Testcontainers for testing MQ Spring applications

UPDATE 2025/06/19: This project has now been released properly to Maven Central.

UPDATE 2025/07/29: The IBM MQ module now appears in the Testcontainers catalog

I have just published a “Tech Preview” of some components needed to simplify testing of Spring Boot applications that use MQ. It uses the Testcontainers framework that many may have heard of, and is intended to make it easy to build temporary resources such as queue managers as part of the test cycle

If you’re interested in looking further, see here. Please leave any comments as issues on the GitHub repository.

This preview is build-it-yourself for now, with the aim being to get feedback before finalising the overall shape and publishing new jars to Maven. It’s also not on the main branch of the ibm-messaging/mq-jms-spring repository, just to keep that clean for now.

Article also published here.

AIX compiler support for MQ

One person asking a question will get an answer; two people asking the same question will probably prompt a post. So here’s the latest: MQ listed the XLC/C++ 16 compiler for AIX as deprecated in 2024 and support for it was removed in version 9.4.2. What does that mean for new development or existing applications?

MQ Spring Boot Starter: More on global transactions

A previous article described some new sample programs showing the use of the MQ Spring Boot starter with transactions. There is a further similar sample now available, using a different transaction manager: Narayana.

Native HA CRR metrics & mqperfck

There will, no doubt, be full discussions elsewhere of the new MQ Native HA Cross-region Replication feature. But one aspect of it seemed particularly relevant to other articles on this site: monitoring the CRR metrics.

The MQ 9.4.2 release also includes another tool, mqperfck, that introduces some additional metrics. And I’ll talk about how that potentially affects other monitoring tools.

MQ PCF value formatting

In MQ V8, a new header file made it easy for C programs to convert MQI numbers into the corresponding string definition. For example, turning 2035 into MQRC_NOT_AUTHORIZED. For formatting PCF-based messages such as events, you can easily convert the names of fields in those events using functions like MQIA_STR or MQCACH_STR. But what about turning the values in those elements into a string? There is a new tool in the MQ Go library to help with MQ PCF value formatting. And it is easy to adopt or port it for other languages too.