We are a non profit organisation and provide IT services for (currently) 21 social insurance organisations (our tenants) in Switzerland. We started to integrate with MQ last year and want to go into production this July. For several reasons, we operate with two providers running our systems (one is T-Systems, maybe known also to some of you).

For each tenant we have a pair of queue managers, on in each operating centre. Makes 42 QMGR in production. (In total we expect on ann our stages a maximum of 188 queue managers). The layout of queues is identical for all tenants.Currently we research on (not so expensive) monitoring tools. While we found Infrared360 as best fit, it is quite expensive for us.

So this is one key question: any recommendations on monitoring, accessing and manipulating queues and their content, we dedicated rights management on who can read or manipulate a queue.

Your last sentence:

with dedicated rights management on who can read or manipulate a queue

suggests you want the access management done outside of MQ in the tool? Could you expand on why this is, and why using the access management provided by MQ itself is not sufficient. Remember that if you only apply access management in a layer outside MQ and not in MQ itself, then you run the risk that someone can bypass that management simply by using a different tool. If you have the access management done in MQ itself, it applies to all tools that might be used to look at MQ queues.

Infrared360 is easily the best fit for you.  Having visibility and actions set in 1 place for every Qmgr & its objects is remarkably less work (i.e. resource, time, $) than doing so on each Qmgr. That feature is easily the most popular amongst their customer base.  There is also nothing to deploy anywhere (agent/client) so again that's a huge (i.e. resource, time, $) savings.  I would get a proper pricing proposal from Avada, it is typically the least expensive of the major products on the market.  Avada has other customers in your geography, so contact them as well to see if they're happy with the solution, support, etc.  

Hi Walter,

Only you and your organization can determine which monitoring solution is best for you.  The first thing you need to do is write a list of things you want monitored.  Second, ask several vendors for a trial of their product to see how it works in your MQ environment.  Third, select and implement the vendor's monitoring tool that best fits your requirements.

I have put together a list of all commercial MQ monitor solutions at http://www.capitalware.com/mq_tools_comm.html

Regards,
Roger Lacroix
Capitalware Inc.

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