How to setup WMB v8 Event Monitoring

In WebSphere Message Broker (WMB) version 8, there have been some significant improvements of the ability to easily configure your environment to start capturing monitoring events related to your message flow transactions.  In this post, we are going to provide the few steps for enabling this for a simple flow using WMB v8 and WMQ v7.  These specific steps enable you to capture transaction data as each message processes through your flow and send to an MQ queue.  This event data includes the payload and transaction data (i.e. what message flow, execution group, timestamp, and other useful transaction information).  What is not included in this post is what you can do with this XML event data.  From here, you can implement a message flow to process this transaction data.  Some examples include parsing out information important to you, logging to file (i.e. using Log4J or WMB logging), updating database, etc.  This data can then be processed to provide you with overall processing statistics or general auditing.  Without an expensive monitoring product you can capture start and end transactions and report on performance.  We can cover this in another post of offline if anyone wants to discuss this further.

Setting up and Enabling Monitoring in WMB v8 and WMQ v7

•  Create WMQ V7 topic ( BROKER_EVENTS_DEFAULT)  to publish broker monitoring events to.  In this example the broker name is:  “wmb8_test” and execution group is “default”.  The topic string the broker uses is:  $SYS/Broker/wmb8_test/Monitoring/default/#

• Create WMQ subscription (MONITOR.EVENTS.DEFAULT) using above topic.  *NOTE:  leave topic string blank, it will get it from publication:  In this example, the destination queue manager is “wmb8_test” and destination queue is “MONITOR.EVENTS.DEFAULT” (this is the destination queue these XML event messages will be sent to).

• Enable monitoring on message flow (In this example, I am sending payload (everything under root which includes properties, headers, and payload).

• Deploy message flows
• Enable flow monitoring on broker

mqsichangeflowmonitoring wmb8_test –c active –e default –f monitor_example_flow

You can now send a message to your message flow and verify that monitor events are going to the “MONITOR.EVENTS.DEFAULT” queue.   Using a tool like RFHUTIL or WMB’s dequeue, you can view the structure and contents of this message.  This will help you design a message flow or other interface for processing these events (i.e. logging, updating transaction database, responding to conditions, etc).

Thank you,