MainView for MQ policies

Policy and Event Pack Content

This particular Policy and Event Pack contains a series of Triggers, Action Pipelines, and Templates for detecting and notifying you of events related to IBM WebSphere MQ technology as monitored by BMC MainView for MQ (MVMQ) through the MVMM qpmainview extension. While this documentation does not provide true documentation of each trigger, a few words on naming conventions should help you to understand. Please ask any questions you have through BMC Communities in reply to the post containing this file.

The heart of the Policy and Event Pack is a series of Triggers to detect various key conditions on IBM WebSphere MQ objects as monitored by MVMM through qpmainview and MVMQ . The naming convention for Policy and Event Pack Triggers is Technology_ObjectType_TriggerCondition. Thus, the MVMQ_RemoteQ_PutInhibited trigger detects the condition where a particular Remote Queue Definition is Put Disabled.

For each Trigger, there are three provided Templates offering different notification mechanisms. Templates of the form TriggerName_BEM will send an event message (via msend) to BMC Event Manager when the TriggerName condition is met. (Note that this uses the BEM_Generic Action Pipeline and does require the configuration of the integration between the MVMM Server and a BEM Cell in order to operate.) Templates of the form TriggerName_Console will produce an alert in the Middleware Monitor Console Event pane when the TriggerName condition is met using the standard consoleAlert Action Pipeline (part of the base MVMM product). (Note that some triggers use Delta conditions that preclude the use of Console Alerts. For those triggers, no TriggerName_Console template is provided.) Finally, templates of the form TriggerName_LogToFile will append an event message to the specifiied log file (logToFile_Generic.log in the MVMM home directory by default) when the TriggerName condition is met.

Event Triggers and Templates

There are many triggers and templates, to obtain a list of the triggers and templates contained in this zip use the following command being careful to use the -n option to prevent an actual import.   It is recommended you redirect the output to a file and use an editor to search for desired triggers or templates.   Both the triggers and templates follow a naming convention beginning with MVMQ_<object type>_<trigger condition>.

Agent Policies

• MVMQ_Agents_ALL_BEM
• MVMQ_Agents_ALL_EMail
• MVMQ_Agents_ALL_LogToFile
• MVMQ_Agents_Basic
• MVMQ_Agents_Minimal
• MVMQ_Agents_Standard_BEM
• MVMQ_Agents_Standard_EMail
• MVMQ_Agents_Standard_LogToFile

Using the Policy and Event Pack

The Event Pack contains a zip file produced by mqsexport. To use the Event Pack objects run the mqsimport command. Depending on which portions of the Event pack you want to use, the command may vary. It is assumed that you will have knowledge of the mqsimport command to customize, but below are some sample commands:

• To import the entire Policy and Event Pack, use the following command:

  mqsimport --policy-read-only Samples/EventPacks/MVMQ/MVMQ_EventPack.zip SA

• To import no policies and all the event triggers and templates, use the following command:

  mqsimport --event-template MVMQ_.* --event-trigger MVMQ_.*  Samples/EventPacks/MVMQ/MVMQ_EventPack.zip SA

• To import all templates and triggers for a specific object type, use the following command (sample for a Remote Queue Definition):

  mqsimport --event-template MVMQ_RemoteQ_.* --event-trigger MVMQ_RemoteQ_.*  Samples/EventPacks/MVMQ/MVMQ_EventPack.zip SA

• To import all triggers but only the templates associated with a particular action, use the following command (sample for BEM):

  mqsimport --event-action-pipeline .*_Generic --event-template MVMQ_.*_BEM --event-trigger MVMQ_.*  Samples/EventPacks/MVMQ/MVMQ_EventPack.zip SA

• To import one specific trigger and template, use the following command (sample for MVMQ_RemoteQ_PutInhibited_BEM):

  mqsimport --event-action-pipeline BEM_Generic --event-template MVMQ_RemoteQ_PutInhibited_BEM --event-trigger MVMQ_RemoteQ_PutInhibited  Samples/EventPacks/MVMQ/MVMQ_EventPack.zip SA

MVMQ_Agents_Minimal

As is typical with Minimal level supplied policies, the MVMQ_Agents_Minimal Agent Policy registers very limited monitoring. 

In general, you should use this policy when you wish to control your monitoring manually by selecting individual objects for monitoring. MVMQ_Agents_Minimal registers the BMM agent for history collection using the SAMPLE history template and applies the Basic BMM Extension Object Policy (see MVMM-self-monitoring-policies). It then has one main Object Policy Group (MVMQ_POLICY_Minimal, as shown below).  

As shown above, this Minimal Policy directly applies a Basic Object Policy to queue managers and the MQ log manager (selecting them for monitoring and registering them for history collection with the SAMPLE history template). Note that the SYSTEM Queues would be covered by the WMQ policies since those are under a WMQ object type.

MVMQ_Agents_Basic

The MVMQ_Agents_Basic Agent Policy applies the same actions to BMM agents and extensions and to MQ queue managers and MQ log manager as the Minimal level. 

However, it adds Basic level Object Policies for Applications, Buffer Pools, Channel Initiators, Coupling Facilties, Queue Sharing Groups, and Queue Stats. For each of these, it selects the Non-System objects for monitoring and registers them for history using the SAMPLE history template. You should use this policy when you want to ensure that all of your objects are monitored, but you want to configure events on your own. Note that Channels, Topics, and Local Queues are covered under the WMQ Policies.

MVMQ_Agents_Standard_EventTarget

The Standard level of monitoring is, as always, the general recommendation for normal systems. Because the Standard level does Events as well as selection for monitoring and history, you need to choose the variant that matches the target (TrueSight Operations=BEM, EMail, or LogToFile) that you want to receive your events. Note that some configuration is necessary to connect to your Event Manager, email server, or log file. 

As is normal for Standard level policies, the MVMQ_Agents_Standard_EventTarget policies apply the Standard level of monitoring against the BMM agents and extensions (see MVMM-self-monitoring-policies and then provide a single main Object Policy Group (MVMQ_POLICY_Standard_EventTarget) with nested object Polices (see below). 

As you can see, MVMQ_POLICY_Standard_EventTarget directly applies Object Policies to all Applications, Buffer Pools, Channel Initiators, Coupling Facilities, Log Info Objects, Log Managers, Queue Managers, Queue Sharing Groups, and (hidden off the page) Queue Stats objects. Note that there are no events to be supplied for Buffer Pools and Queue Managers since these are MainView for MQ specific types, but all key metrics for eventing are covered under the WMQ policies. For all of the other types, MVMQ specific events are added. It is beyond the scope of this section to describe all of the event actions applied on these individual objects.

MVMQ_Agents_ALL_EventTarget

The MVMQ_Agents_ALL_EventTarget Agent Policy registers a large number of additional events for the Application, Channel Initiator, LogManager, and QueueSharingGroupDB2 object types. In addition, it registers events (e.g. Put Disabled) against Alias and Remote queues. This policy is intended to illustrate the scope of what is possible. It is strongly recommended that you do not enable this policy directly in a production environment. Instead, you can enable it in a well-controlled testing environment to experiment with policies and to select the event templates that are relevant to your specific environment before creating a customized policy that removes the associations that you do not want.

Where to go from here

Now that you have imported the Policy and Event Pack for this technology, go to Getting started with policies to enable them.