IBM TechExchange starts in 13 days. The MQ team are busy booking taxis, polishing presentations, and trying to find our passports. On Monday the 6th we will be hosting a user group, and we have just put the finishing touches to the agenda which I am excited to share below. Hope to see you there!

13:45 - 14:00 Welcome, introductions, plans for the day & week

IBM MQ development team

14:00 - 14:30 OTel and MQ Deep Dive

Matt Leming, MQ Chief Architect, IBM

OpenTelemetry has become the de facto standard for observing distributed systems regardless of where they are running. This session looks at how your queue managers can take part in distributed traces and contribute OpenTelemetry metrics and log data to your observability back-end.

14:30 - 15:00 Establishing IBM MQ Baselines: What to Measure and Why
Peter D’Agosta, Chief Product Manager, Avada Software

Modern MQ teams are awash in metrics, but not all data is equally useful. This session focuses on what to collect—and how to use it—to establish defensible IBM MQ performance baselines and to spot anomalies that may signal security issues or application misbehavior. Peter will frame a practical approach to baseline building—using live, representative data windows, percentiles, and trend/outlier analysis—then highlight the MQ metrics that most reliably tell you when “normal” is slipping. 

Attendees will learn:

• A pragmatic recipe for building MQ baselines and how to keep them current. 

• Which MQ signals to prioritize for “is this normal?” and why. 

• How to translate baselines into alerting that reduces noise.

 
15:00 - 15:30 Afternoon break

15:30 - 16:00 Work Smart Organizing Your Team for Large Scale MQ Upgrades

John Carr, Principal Program Manager for Middleware Services, TxMQ, inc
Economies of scale aren't limited to the cloud. As an IBM MQ administrator you most likely manage a large, diverse MQ network using traditional commodity or virtual servers on-prem as well on the cloud. On top of that, you're challenged with upgrading IBM MQ with limited resources. How should you approach your upgrade in such economies of scale? This session walks you through such challenges (from server management, to security, to deployment) and gives food-for-thought on how to organize yourself and your team.

16:00 - 16:30 Quantum-Safe MQ

Matt Leming, MQ Chief Architect, IBM

IBM’s quantum roadmap implies that within the next decade we could have quantum computers powerful enough to render much of today’s cryptography obsolete. This session discusses the impact of quantum computing on MQ’s security mechanisms, describes what mitigations you can deploy today, and how we are planning for the future.

16:30 - 17:15 Native HA and Cross Region Replication deep dive

Jon Rumsey, IBM MQ Distributed Queue Manager Architect

Join Jon Rumsey for a deep dive into MQ’s Native HA capability and its recent addition for disaster recovery scenarios: Cross Region Replication. 

17:15-17:45 Customer feedback and discussion