Troubleshooting: Gaining access to queue manager data

If possible, use the IBM® MQ container inspector tool to collect troubleshooting information. If you cannot use the tool, you can collect the information yourself manually. As part of the manual process, you can use the PVC inspector tool to gain access to the files on a queue manager PVC where a remote shell cannot be established to the queue manager pod. This might be because the pod is in an Error or CrashLoopBackOff state. This tool is designed for use with queue managers deployed by the IBM MQ Operator on Red Hat® OpenShift® only..

Before you begin

Notes:

If your deployment is on Amazon EKS, use the IBM MQ container inspector tool instead.
If your deployment is on Red Hat OpenShift, use the IBM MQ container inspector if possible because it collects information in a simplified and standardized way. If you cannot use the tool or prefer not to use it, you can use the following manual procedure.

If you continue with this task, ensure that you have access to your queue manager namespace.

About this task

If you are collecting troubleshooting information manually, you can access the data that is stored on the Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) associated with a given queue manager by using a tool to mount the PVCs to a set of inspector pods. You can then get a remote shell into any of the inspector pods to read the files.

Depending on the type of deployment, between one and three inspector pods are created. Volumes specific to a given pod of a Native-HA or Multi-Instance queue manager are available on the associated PVC inspector pod. Shared volumes are available on all inspectors. The name of the inspector pod contains the name of the associated queue manager pod.

Procedure

Download the MQ PVC inspector tool.

The tool is available here: https://github.com/ibm-messaging/mq-pvc-tool.
Make sure that you are logged into your cluster.
Find out the name of the queue manager, and the namespace the queue manager is running in.
Run the inspector tool against your queue manager.
1. Run the following command, specifying your queue manager name and its namespace name.
```
./pvc-tool.sh queue_manager_name queue_manager_namespace_name
```
2. After the tool has completed, run the following command to view the inspector pods being created.
```
oc get pods
```
View the files mounted to the inspector pod.
1. Each PVC inspector pod is associated with a queue manager pod, so there might be multiple inspector pods. Access one of these pods, by running the following command:
```
oc rsh pvc-inspector-pod-name
```
  You are placed in the directory containing the mounted PVC directories.
2. List the PVC directories by running the following command:
```
ls
```
3. See a list of the PVCs by running the following command outside of the remote shell session:
```
oc get pvc
```
4. Clean up the pods created by the tool, by running the following command:
```
oc delete pods -l tool=mq-pvc-inspector
```