MQ

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  • 1.  How are your MQ Teams setup?

    Posted Wed May 09, 2018 11:40 AM

    A decision was made to Split MQ Support between Mainframe and Distributed. At times it causes issues not knowing where issues reside and not being able to look at the other side. Whether it is Mainframe looking at the Distributed Environment or the other way around. How are your MQ Teams setup?



  • 2.  RE: How are your MQ Teams setup?

    Posted Wed May 09, 2018 10:16 PM

    Rick,

    I have a lot of clients where MQ, and other middleware, support is split by platforms.  While this may may make sense based upon skill sets (especially on z/OS), I'm not generally in favor of this kind of split.  There definitely is platform engineering knowledge that is essential, particularly on z/OS, but most of the MQ skills are cross platform.  I prefer the middleware teams to have a more holistic point of view, with one team covering all platforms, data centers, and lines of business.  You can then augment that with the necessary platform skills.  Unfortunately, this is the pattern that I see the least frequently.  

    I also frequently see splits by either Line of Business or by geography.  Most of these types of splits are based upon organizational convenience rather than from functional necessity.  I also see splits between Application Developers, Architects, and Administrators.  This also tends to blur the lines of responsibility.  

    I would prefer to see a single group, delivering MQ as their product, and entirely responsible for the successfully delivery and use of their product within the organization.  Combining responsibility with authority is a constant organizational challenge, as it leaves nowhere to hide.  The typical organizational behavior is to obfuscate responsibility as this also defuses blame and so lowers risk for the individuals involved  

     

    Regards,

    Glen Brumbaugh



  • 3.  RE: How are your MQ Teams setup?

    Posted Thu May 10, 2018 05:18 PM

    Glen wrote:
    I would prefer to see a single group, delivering MQ as their product, and entirely responsible for the successfully delivery and use of their product within the organization.  Combining responsibility with authority is a constant organizational challenge, as it leaves nowhere to hide.  The typical organizational behavior is to obfuscate responsibility as this also defuses blame and so lowers risk for the individuals involved  

    From experience, I agree with this approach and justification.

    In any team of MQ support folks, some will have greater / lesser skills on the various platforms, some will have greater / lesser skills on aspects of MQ. The key is to work together as a team and encourage broader experience and skills over time. UNIX and Windows platforms specifics are fairly easy to pick up, but zSeries and iSeries are complex and unique worlds of their own. I have worked on all of these and performed MQ upgrades and complex problem analysis. Knowing multiple OS's has great benefits.

    Glenn



  • 4.  RE: How are your MQ Teams setup?

    Posted Fri May 11, 2018 04:03 AM

    We are a large organization using MQ as our primary messaging backbone and we have one centralized area supporting all platforms mainly due to the fact that we have an individual (me) that has supported MQ for around 20 years (yes MQ hasn't been around much longer than that).  The advantage to this setup is what the others have said, problems are identified quicker and resolved faster as MQ doesn't really care what the platform is.  The disadvantage to this is the MQ administrator has to have knowledge about each different operating system requirements/quirks which is extremely rare.  For instance, the default persistence on a mainframe queue manager is yes, but on distributed it is no, on mainframes you have pagesets for space, on distributed you have file systems, on distributed you need to worry about shared memory system settings, on mainframe you don't.  So you would have to count me in on a centralized support structure, but it seem to be more costly due to the experience level of the administrator. 



  • 5.  RE: How are your MQ Teams setup?

    Posted Fri May 11, 2018 05:02 AM

    We have one team covering mainframe and distributed (Windows, RHEL, AIX and iseries). We get help doing the installs/patching on Mainframe and iSeries. It works pretty well, some of us have more in-depth knowledge of a particular OS than others but for day to day support that knowledge is not usually required. I think splitting off the various platforms would dilute the MQ knowledge. MQ is a very stable platform and seeing the quirks across platforms is a great way of learning the product in detail.