ibmmq Archives - Mark Taylor's Blog

Publishing MQ Events to Kafka

Last year, I released a program that would read MQ Event messages, format them, and send them directly to an OpenTelemetry backend. I wrote about it here. I’ve now extended it to also publish events to a Kafka topic.

This post was last updated on November 10th, 2026 at 01:35 pm

OTel Context Propagation: part 7 – Removing effects of the MQ Tracing Exit

This article discusses a new API Exit that might help to solve a problem experienced by a number of users trying out the MQ Tracing Exit. When that exit is configured, it adds properties to the MQ message to carry OpenTelemetry context data. A receiving application may be surprised to see those properties. So this new exit can remove an unexpected RFH2 structure, allowing the application to continue to run unchanged.

This post was last updated on August 19th, 2026 at 06:51 pm

Formatting MQ SMF records: MQ 10 update

MQ 10 for z/OS has additional fields in its SMF data. While useful, they brought challenges to the mqsmfcsv program that a number of people use for formatting and then analysing MQ SMF records.

This post was last updated on July 1st, 2026 at 08:41 am

New NPM installation policies

The standard package manager for Node.js applications, npm, is changing. New npm installation policies may affect how you obtain and install some Node.js components.

What is happening? How does it affect MQ? What will you need to do?

This post was last updated on July 16th, 2026 at 06:04 pm

EoL: MQ with Spring Boot 3

Spring Boot 3 is about to reach its “end of non-commercial support”. What does that mean for MQ’s support of the Spring Boot environment?

This post was last updated on June 16th, 2026 at 10:51 am

OTel Context Propagation: part 6 – MQ Kafka Connectors

Previous articles in this series have shown OpenTelemetry (OTel) Context propagation for MQ applications in different languages.

This article is rather different. It shows the results of experiments I made with adding OTel tracing to the IBM MQ Kafka Connectors.

This post was last updated on May 11th, 2026 at 03:55 pm

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.

This post was last updated on January 8th, 2026 at 09:06 am

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.