In IBM Integration Bus, message flow statistics and accounting data can be collected to record performance and operating details of one or more message flows. Message flow statistics and accounting data captures dynamic information about the runtime behavior of a message flow. For example, it indicates how many messages are processed and how large those messages are, as well as processor usage and elapsed processing times.
Introduction
The IBM Integration Bus runtime has built-in support for publishing the message flow statistics and accounting data in XML or JSON format on MQ or MQTT topics, writing SMF records on z/OS, or recording to user trace.
One of the less publicized features in IBM Integration Bus 10.0.0.5 is the introduction of a new C plugin API (see the header file BipCsi.h in the product installation) that allows developers to write C plugins that can access the statistics data directly. This provides an alternative route to capturing the XML or JSON publications from MQ or MQTT, and transforming those publications into the correct format before sending them on to another application for storage or visualization.
One such application that is seeing a lot of interest at the moment is Grafana. Grafana is usually found as part of a stack of open source products. That stack includes – StatsD, a statistics gathering daemon – Graphite, a time-series database and graphing tool – and Grafana, a tool for visualizing time-series data in the form of dashboards.
In order to demonstrate how you can use the new C plugin API, we have developed and published a sample plugin that writes IBM Integration Bus statistics to the StatsD, Graphite, and Grafana stack. By installing and configuring this sample plugin, you can publish statistics data from multiple integration nodes across multiple systems and build a single dashboard showing the aggregated data.
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