Author: Mark

Finding some positives

Have to find something good in the current situation, and here’s one thing that worked for me.

My passport expires later this year. I was a bit worried about finding a suitable gap in my schedule when I could do without it for a while. As soon as it became obvious there would not be any travel in the immediate future, I filled out the online form and used my phone to take and upload a new photo. The UK government site said the normal processing takes up to three weeks. 12 days later my new passport was delivered (with the blue/black cover). Much faster than I had expected.

I also need to get the US Global Entry renewal sorted out. That requires an initial background check from the UK which claims to take up to 2 weeks. I received the approval for that in 12 hours.

Just hope I get to use the passport soon…

MQ JMS and Spring Boot – improved efficiency

The efficiency of MQ JMS is now improved when used in a Spring Boot application.

The Spring Framework provides simple ways for Java programs to use a variety of interfaces. Its JMS component includes classes that help a program wait for new messages, similar to a Message Driven Bean. The default behaviour of the Spring implementation is known to be non-optimal when working with IBM MQ and I wanted to improve the efficiency.

This article shows recent improvements to Spring Boot and the corresponding MQ JMS Spring Boot component. They remove the need for application developers to know about, and to write code to deal with that inefficiency.

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This post was last updated on March 30th, 2020 at 04:41 pm

Accidental Plagiarism

This started out as a pleasant-enough chord/bass improvisation. Nothing special but I hoped it might inspire something.

Unfortunately, when I began to put a melody on top, it was sounding a little familiar. It’s a bit jerky because once I got to this point I didn’t bother cleaning up the performances.

This post was last updated on November 25th, 2019 at 01:31 pm

Viewing MQ configurations with Grafana

This post shows how you can use Grafana to selectively view information about your MQ configuration. Which may sound a little odd. Grafana’s strength is primarily to show statistics and metrics in pretty graphs. So why would we want to use it to look at queue definitions? The answer is that you usually would not! There are many more appropriate tools for displaying and updating the queue manager configuration – even the MQ Explorer or MQ Console are better. But there may be times when a limited set of information may be desirable, so you can link from a graph to a different view, within the same tool.

But another important aspect that I hope this shows is the power of a common data format. The techniques I’ll show here could be used to combine a variety of different tools, and perhaps this will give you some ideas.

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This post was last updated on November 25th, 2019 at 02:18 pm

Flight is 25% cancelled

In the departure gate area at Heathrow, waiting for my plane to board. There are delays, and I can overhear conversations between crew, maintenance staff and agents. Eventually there’s an announcement – “the flight will be boarding soon, but can everyone who is seated in rows 32-40 please come to the side.”

The explanation given is that one of the exit doors at the back is broken. It is shut OK but will not open safely and cannot be repaired right away. So the decision is that noone will be allowed to sit in the rear section of the aircraft; they will have to be rebooked. If an emergency happens, they can get the remaining passengers out of the rest of the doors.

Once on board, I can see that the affected rows are taped off. They are not letting anyone spread out into those seats. There are many checks to ensure all the available seats are taken – the small gaps that often exist get filled in. There’s even an announcement that they will do a walkthrough of the cabin and you MUST be in the seat, not even using one of the lavs. Otherwise your seat WILL BE reassigned. While all that is going on, I can see from the window that there’s activity to remove the non-travelling passengers’ luggage. They claim they got all the right stuff off and left the correct stuff on.

What surprised me somewhat was that even after takeoff, when the emergency doors were not useful, they still didn’t allow people to spread out. But the light load did mean we got to Chicago on time, even after the long departure delay!

This post was last updated on November 18th, 2019 at 08:59 pm

Exploring the MQ archives: Education 1996-style

Recently, we have been creating and publishing a lot of material to help educate people about MQ. You can find that here.

But how might you have learned about MQ in its early days? While hunting through archives for something that I was, in the end, unable to find, I did come across one piece of education that was created over 20 years ago.

You can now see what it was like in this video.

Table of Contents for the training program

Just a few thoughts that I had:

  • While the style may be different, and details vary, a lot of the content is recognisably the same
  • It’s nice to see the MQ Dancers logo return, even as a tiny icon
  • In 1996, the course ended by saying that MQ was “long-term”. Yes, they got that right.

I hope you enjoy it.

This post was last updated on November 20th, 2019 at 09:14 pm

Using Prometheus to monitor MQ channel status

In 2016 I wrote about how MQ’s resource statistics can work with a number of time-series databases, including Prometheus. This permits monitoring using the same tools that many customers use for monitoring other products. It allows easy creation of dashboards using tools such as Grafana.

Since that original version, we’ve made a number of enhancements to the packages that underpin that monitoring capability. For example, more database options were added; a JSON formatter appeared. One notable change was when we split the monitoring agent programs into a separate GitHub repository, making it easier to work with just the pieces you needed.

And now, I’ve released some changes that allow Prometheus and generic JSON processors to see some key channel status information. In particular, a Grafana dashboard can easily highlight channels that are not running.

Continue reading “Using Prometheus to monitor MQ channel status”

This post was last updated on November 25th, 2019 at 09:53 am