mq_aws

MQ Exporter for Amazon CloudWatch monitoring

This README should be read in conjunction with the repository-wide README that covers features common to all of the collectors in this repository.

This directory contains the code for a monitoring solution that exports queue manager data to a CloudWatch data collection system. It also contains configuration files to run the monitor program

An example Grafana dashboard is included, to show how queries might be constructed. The data shown is the same as in the corresponding Prometheus-based dashboard, also in this repository. To use the dashboard, create a data source in Grafana called "MQ CloudWatch" that points at your AWS server, and then import the JSON file. Grafana does not make it as easy to handle wildcard queries to CloudWatch, so this dashboard explicitly names the queues to monitor. There may be better solutions using templates, but that starts to get more complex than I want to show in this example.

Configuring MQ

It is convenient to run the monitor program as a queue manager service. This directory contains an MQSC script to define the service. In fact, the service definition points at a simple script which sets up any necessary environment and builds the command line parameters for the real monitor program. As the last line of the script is "exec", the process id of the script is inherited by the monitor program, and the queue manager can then check on the status, and can drive a suitable STOP SERVICE operation during queue manager shutdown.

Edit the MQSC script and the shell script to point at appropriate directories where the program exists, and where you want to put stdout/stderr. Ensure that the ID running the queue manager has permission to access the programs and output files.

There are a number of required parameters to configure the service, including the queue manager name, how to reach a database, and the frequency of reading the queue manager publications. Look at the mq_aws.sh script or the sample yaml file to see how to provide these parameters.

For authentication, the program is expecting to pick up the keys from $HOME/.aws/credentials. That file is not explicitly referenced in this code; it's used automatically by the AWS toolkit. You may need to provide a region name as a command-line option if it is not mentioned in the credentials file.

The queue manager will usually generate its publications every 10 seconds. However, the default interval being used by this monitor program is set to 60 seconds for reading those publications because of the slower rate that CloudWatch monitoring usually works at, and to reduce the number of calls to CloudWatch which do contribute to AWS charges.

Configuring CloudWatch

No special configuration is required for CloudWatch. You will see the MQ data appear in the Custom Metrics options, with a default namespace of "IBM/MQ". There are two sets of metrics in that namespace, one for the queue manager (with the qmgr filter) and one for the queues (with the object,qmgr filter).

Metrics

Once the monitor program has been started, you will see metrics being available. console. All of the queue manager values are given a tag of the queue manager name; all of the other object-based values are tagged with both the object and queue manager names.

The example Grafana dashboard shows how queries can be constructed to extract data about specific queues or the queue manager.

More information on the metrics collected through the publish/subscribe interface can be found in the MQ KnowledgeCenter with further description in an MQDev blog entry

The metrics stored in the database are named after the descriptions that you can see when running the amqsrua sample program, but with some minor modifications to match a more useful style.