Integrating with the IBM Cloud Pak for Integration Operations Dashboard

The ability to trace transactions through IBM Cloud Pak® for Integration is provided by the Operations Dashboard.

About this task

Enabling integration with the Operations Dashboard installs an MQ API exit to your queue manager. The API exit will send tracing data to the Operations Dashboard data store, about messages which are flowing through the queue manager.

Note that only messages which are sent using MQ client bindings are traced.

Also note that for versions of the IBM® MQ Operator before 1.5, when tracing is enabled, the tracing agent and collector images deployed alongside the queue manager were always the latest versions available, which may introduce an incompatibility if you are not using the latest version of IBM Cloud Pak for Integration.

Procedure

Deploy a queue manager with tracing enabled
By default, the tracing feature is disabled.

If you are deploying using the IBM Cloud Pak for Integration Platform Navigator, then you can enable tracing while deploying, by setting Enable Tracing to On, and setting the Tracing Namespace to the namespace where the Operations Dashboard is installed. For more information on deploying a queue manager, see Deploying a queue manager using the IBM Cloud Pak for Integration Platform Navigator
If you are deploying using the Red Hat OpenShift CLI or Red Hat OpenShift web console, then you can enable tracing with the following YAML snippet:
```
spec:
  tracing:
    enabled: true
    namespace: <Operations_Dashboard_Namespace
```
Important: The queue manager will not start until MQ has been registered with the Operations Dashboard (see the next step).
Note that when this feature is enabled, it will run two sidecar containers ("Agent" and "Collector") in addition to the queue manager container. The images for these sidecar containers will be available in the same registry as the main MQ image, and will use the same pull policy and pull secret. There are additional settings available to configure CPU and memory limits.
If this is the first time a queue manager with Operations Dashboard integration has been deployed in this namespace, then you need to Register with the Operations Dashboard.
Registering creates a Secret object which the queue manager Pod needs to successfully start.