What's new in IBM MQ 9.2.2 for z/OS - Advanced and Advanced VUE entitlement

IBM® MQ 9.2.2 includes enhancements for Managed File Transfer on z/OS®.

Managing IBM MQ

New Managed File Transfer commands for starting and stopping resource monitors
Improved guidance for use of Managed File Transfer on z/OS with data sets

New Managed File Transfer commands for starting and stopping resource monitors

Before IBM MQ 9.2.2, the only way to stop a resource monitor was by stopping the agent that was running the monitor operation. To restart a resource monitor, you had to restart the agent altogether.

From IBM MQ 9.2.2, two new commands, fteStartMonitor and fteStopMonitor, allow you to start and stop resource monitors without needing to stop or restart an agent.

Note that the JCL for fteStartMonitor is BFGXMNST, and the JCL for fteStopMonitor is BFGXMNSP.

This is useful, for example, in the following situations:

If an agent has multiple resource monitors, and only some of them have encountered errors but the remaining resource monitors are still working fine so you just want to restart the failed resource monitors.
If you want to stop a resource monitor to carry out some maintenance work, or if the resource monitor is not required for certain time and you do not want it to run unnecessarily, thus consuming precious system resources.

You can run these commands from any system where the Managed File Transfer commands component is installed, which means that you can start and stop a resource monitor from anywhere, and are not restricted to the system where the agent that owns the resource monitor is running. For more information, see Starting an MFT resource monitor and Stopping an MFT resource monitor.

Improved guidance for use of Managed File Transfer on z/OS with data sets

This is a documentation only enhancement.

On z/OS, Managed File Transfer supports transfer of data to and from files and data sets. A wide range of data set types and characteristics are supported, but Transferring between data sets on z/OS describes some restrictions that apply. See the section on Partitioned data sets (PDS) and partitioned data set extended (PDSE) data sets for more detailed information.

Using Managed File Transfer in combination with z/OS utilities to transfer files gives additional guidance by describing methods that can be used to transfer data sets for which Managed File Transfer has restrictions.