MH06 Trace Tools supportpac update

There has been a new release of the MH06 Trace Tools supportpac. 

https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/mh06-websphere-mq-trace-tools

Here is a summary of the updates:

1) mqtrcfrmt now supports IBM MQ 9.2.  mqtrcfrmt was tested against IBM MQ 9.2 Windows and Linux strmqtrc traces and also updated to recognize new constant values added in IBM MQ 9.2.

2) The amqsact (Application Activity Trace sample) formatting in mqtrcfrmt has been enhanced to also include the more helpful functionality that was previously included in amqsactz.

In earlier MH06 supportpac releases, there was an amqsactz C source code tool that included formatting and report enhancements to the IBM supplied amqsact Application Activity Trace sample.  The more helpful formatting and report enhancements in amqsactz has been moved into the mqtrcfrmt.jar and is now provided as a post-processor formatting option to amqsact output.  In other words, you first run amqsact (with the verbose output) and then mqtrcfrmt.jar on the amqsact output to better format the data.  Here is an example:

> amqsact -v > amqsact.out

> java -jar mqtrcfrmt.jar -i amqsact.out -t aat

The above commands result in a amqsact.out.2 file that includes formatting and report enhancements which are documented in the MH06.pdf manual.  High level the enhancements include an inserted API summary line for each API call, a unique record number that links each activity trace message in the verbose output to their applicable API summary lines, and a report at the bottom of the amqsact.out.2 file that summarizes the activity trace data by unique connection id.  Since most of the amqsactz functionality has been now moved into mqtrcrmt, the amqsactz C source code has been removed from the supportpac.

3) Multi-line search capability for -s command line argument in mqtrcfrmt.

In earlier MH06 supportpac releases, there was a -s option that gave the ability to search for a string of text or hex bytes in the MQ messages included in a trace.  This functionality has been enhanced to allow multiple strings/hex bytes (up to 3) to be provided with an AND or OR search on these multiple strings.  In other words, if you want to find a message in a trace (both strmqtrc or amqsact) that contains the strings “quick” and “brown” and “fox”, you can do this with mqtrcfmt with this enhanced search capability.

4) Over 50% wall time reduction by changing to buffered I/O for writing to output trace files for mqtrcfrmt.

In earlier MH06 supportpac releases, the Java functionality that was being used to write data to the formatted trace data output files was not using buffered I/O.  Based on a tip that was read in a Java performance book (“Java Performance: The Definitive Guide” by Scott Oaks), this functionality has been changed to use buffered I/O which results in a very significant performance boost. 

5) New mqtrcfrmt -b command line argument to provide percentage status of how much of the total trace lines have been processed.

When you run mqtrcfrmt on large trace files, it can take a while to complete.  This -b option allows the user to get a status of percentage done for a given interval.  For example, you can provide the option “-b 15” to mqtrcfrmt, and then get status updates every 15 seconds of how much of the current run has completed.

6) Corrected mqtrcfrmt bug for when you only specified the -f and -v command line options for MQ constant resolution, mqtrcfrmt was incorrectly requiring a -i command line argument.

7) Corrected mqtrcfrmt parsing and formatting issue with recent Windows strmqtrc API traces (this was probably introduced after MQ 8.0) that added extraneous data between the dump hex prefix (e.g. 0x0000) and actual dump bytes in the API data structures.  This format change to the API dumps in the Windows strmqtrc data was causing mqtrcfrmt to not be able to properly parse and format most of the API trace dump data.  Mqtrcfrmt now ignores these extraneous bytes and properly parses and formats the strmqtrc API structure dump data for Windows v9 strmqtrc API traces.

NOTE:

If you are looking for more help on how to use the MH06 Trace Tools supportpac, there are several sessions that I did at the MQTC conference that go into more detail about how to use MH06.  You can find the sessions here -> https://www.mqtechconference.com/.