Mark, Author at Mark Taylor's Blog

Using Loki and Grafana with MQ logs

It is odd how often similar questions come at the same time from unrelated places. Because of the projects and articles I’ve written about visualising MQ’s metrics in Grafana, I recently had a couple of people asking about using that same front-end but able to work with log-file data. Specifically would it be possible to use Loki and Grafana together with MQ. My immediate reaction was that I didn’t know what Loki was in this context, but clearly they couldn’t be asking about a Norse god or Marvel character. Instead after a very short search and a few minutes reading, I guessed that it ought to be possible to use it. Which was my reply.

But of course, I’m not likely to leave it there when I learn about a new tool. Especially when I have a reasonable starting point like a working local Grafana setup. And so I have done some very quick experiments to prove that the approach really can work. On the way I’ll also take a brief digression into using logrotate.

This post was last updated on February 9th, 2021 at 02:37 pm

Save MQ configuration as JSON

A requirement I’ve seen a couple of times recently asked how to save an MQ queue manager’s configuration in a different format than MQSC. This short post shows one way to do that.

This post was last updated on December 11th, 2020 at 10:27 am

More flexibility for user management in MQ

A new option in MQ 9.2.1 on Unix/Linux platforms gives more flexibility in user management, with no need to make operating system definitions for application users. This post describes why you might want this, how you can use the option and gives a simple example to demonstrate it. Note that this does not apply to Windows or the MQ Appliance.

This post was last updated on December 3rd, 2020 at 02:08 pm

MQ Exit source code repository

We’ve recently made available a new repository at https://github.com/ibm-messaging/mq-exits that is intended to hold the source code for various MQ Exits of different kinds.

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This post was last updated on November 17th, 2020 at 07:47 pm

Formatting SMF records

One tool I created a few years ago deals with formatting SMF records from z/OS. I designed it to take MQ’s 115 and 116 records and generate output that users could import to spreadsheets and SQL databases. I made a video about the original version of the tool here, and I wrote about more enhancements to that tool in this post.

If you want to know more about how to use the data after formatting, then Lyn has a lot of posts at her blog site talking about analyses she has run and lessons she has learned.

Most recently I’ve added (with help) some formatting options to deal with a couple of additional record types. That work showed how non-standardised SMF records are, and how much manual work is needed to create formatters. This post will talk about how something that supposedly has a common format does not really.

This post was last updated on October 29th, 2020 at 10:19 am

Sometimes things don’t work out

A few days ago, I had a really clever idea.

At least, it seemed like that at the time. In this post I’ll write about something that didn’t quite pan out as I’d hoped.

Improvising a teleprompter

For a web conference session I was giving this afternoon, I’d written a script. Although I might not follow it exactly, it was meant to give a structure and ensure I didn’t forget points I wanted to make. But reading it while looking down at a printed page would make it difficult to look at the camera. And looking at the camera would make it difficult to read the words. Not to mention the problem of driving the slides through, by clicking on the presentation application in a browser. Putting things on the laptop’s 2nd monitor would mean frequent eye movement so I was not “looking at” the audience. Not very satisfactory.

With an hour to go, I had a brainwave – I could use my standby laptop propped up behind the main system and use that screen. And because of the need to both click on the presentation system AND to scroll through the script, while not looking down to move cursors or switch between applications, I’d be able to use another mouse. I grabbed an empty box to act as a stand, copied a PDF to the other machine, and tried it out. I had left-hand for the teleprompter scrolling mouse; right-hand for the presenting mouse.

And it all seemed to work pretty well from my perspective. Other than running short on time. But that was not the technology’s fault.

Using a 2nd system as an improvised teleprompter

This post was last updated on August 7th, 2020 at 08:45 am

Presentations for virtual events

This week I’ve been preparing material for two virtual events that are happening at the same time: SHARE and IBM’s Integration Technical Conference. In normal times, I’d have had to make a choice as to which conference to attend, but both are now using remote presentations. So I can give talks (different ones) at both.

The TechCon event is using “live” presentations, streamed with the presenter talking from home. I’ve been doing a lot of presentations like that already over the last few months – I talked about that in another recent post. While the platform running the TechCon stream is different, and some details will change, it’s probably not really going to affect how I work with that material.

The SHARE event is a little more interesting technically as they want the sessions to be prerecorded, submitted as a video, and then having just a short live Q&A at the end. I guess that helps with risky situations like bandwidth restrictions or network failures at the presenter’s end. Running everything centrally makes it more controllable. But I found a couple of challenges doing the recordings.

This post was last updated on July 26th, 2020 at 05:22 pm

Hidden rooms, fake backgrounds

Like many in recent months I’ve been doing a lot more communication using web conferencing solutions. All meetings are virtual, you can’t kick a person under the table to shut them up, you get very familiar with some nostrils from their camera angles, there are some who sound like they are talking through several layers of mud.

After the first few calls I had where there were comments about the drinks cabinet behind me (and at least one person proposing to measure the height of the fluid in each bottle to see how it changed by the next meeting) I decided to change the picture. And the audio. But not the bottles.

This post will talk about my setup and its use of a few technologies to make it all seem a bit more professional. I might not use all of this capability for internal discussions with one or two other people. But I think it helps particularly when doing presentations and education sessions to customers.

This post was last updated on July 7th, 2020 at 09:43 pm

Updates for MQ metric exporters

The MQ metric exporters are a set of Go programs that deliver queue manager statistics and status to databases such as Prometheus and Influx. They have recently been updated, giving more consistent function and a much easier configuration. This post will explore and explain these changes.

For an introduction to these exporters, see some of my earlier posts in this blog.

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This post was last updated on November 27th, 2021 at 02:59 pm