Running the MainView monitoring extension

This section contains information about installing and controlling the BMC MainView monitoring extension on the supported platforms, and includes:

See Supported middleware monitoring technologies (Performance and Availability) for a list of the technology/platform pairs and appropriate versions that are supported in this release.

The BMC MainView monitoring extension collects performance and availability data from MainView for WebSphere MQ (MVMQ) via the View-based API component. The MainView monitoring extension passes the data to the TMTM Extensible Agent, which then sends it to the TMTM Topic Service and on to the TMTM Monitor Console.

Controlling the MainView monitoring extension on Windows 

1. Open a command prompt and change to the directory containing the distributed files.
2. Enter the MainView monitoring extension command qpmainview followed by the required command parameter.
   
   To list all available command parameters, enter:
   qpmainview.bat --help
   
   For example:
   • qpmainview.bat --start starts the monitoring extension as a service.
   • qpmainview.bat --stop stops the monitoring extension.
   • qpmainview.bat --status reports on the current status of the monitoring extension (started or stopped).

To register topics

Generate a qpreg input file containing the list of topics (objects) for TMTM to monitor.

1. Log on to MainView Explorer.
2. Navigate within MainView Explorer to QPREGZ and REGISTER views and select objects for TMTM monitoring by performing the following steps:
   1. Select the Product tab, and then expand the MVMQS tree in the Contexts by product tree (in the upper right).
   2. Select the required MainView Server Connection (MVEXP: MainView Explorer).
   3. Select the required Queue Manager (MVMQS: MainView for MQ).
   4. Select MVMQS in the Product tree (in the lower left).
   5. To see all objects of the Queue Manager and (un)register from that list, expand OVERVIEW, and select REGISTER.
   6. To see a subset of the objects of the Queue Manager and (un)register from that list, expand SUMMARY, and select QPREGZ.
      

      Refer to the MainView documentation for details on how to select objects to be registered or unregistered using the QPREGZ and REGISTER views. Note that you can right-click to perform actions. In addition, if you click the green check mark in the toolbar, you can use the standard Ctrl and Shift keys with your mouse to select multiple items for the action, enabling you to register or unregister a number of items at a time.
      
      

3. Use the MainView Explorer SAVEREG command to save the objects to be monitored to a mainframe dataset.

4. Transfer the mainframe data set to a file name in the agent directory on the host running qpmainview.

   Note

   When transferring the qpreg input file, ensure that the code page of the transferred file is a US-ASCII compatible character set. This is particularly important if any EBCDIC to ASCII conversion takes place by default in the file transfer tool being used – the default character set choices might not be appropriate. Always view the transferred file and verify correct character set translation has occurred. Refer to the documentation for the file transfer utility being used for details.
5. Run the TMTM qpreg program to register the selected objects:
   
   qpreg file filename
   
   where:
   filename is the name you gave the file in the previous step.
6. If the TMTM for MainView extension is already running, issue an event to request that it checks the updated topics. Do this by entering: qpreg events 32

Controlling the MainView monitoring extension on UNIX and z/OS (USS) 

The agent runs in Unix System Services (USS) under z/OS. MainView monitoring extension runs as a Java process. If you want to work directly with the process, use the ps command to find the active Java processes.

1. Open a command prompt and change to the directory containing the distributed files.
2. Enter the monitoring extension command qpmainview.sh followed by the required command parameter.
   
   To list all available command parameters, enter:
   qpmainview.sh --help
   
   For example:

• • qpmainview.sh --start starts the monitoring extension in the background.
  • qpmainview.sh --stop stops the monitoring extension.
  • qpmainview.sh --status reports on the current status of the monitoring extension (started or stopped).