Monitoring IBM MQ Appliance with OpenTelemetry

IBM MQ Appliance is a hardware product that includes IBM MQ installed and ready to use. Instana uses OpenTelemetry data collector to monitor IBM MQ Appliance host.

Make sure that Java SDK 11 or later is installed.

To check the Java SDK version:

java -version

To set up OpenTelemetry IBM MQ Appliance data collector, complete the following steps:

1. Download the latest OpenTelemetry Data Collector Drivers (ODCD) from OpenTelemetry Data Collector Drivers Release.

2. Extract the package to a deployment location.

tar vxf otel-dc-host-0.2.3.tar
cd otel-dc-host-0.2.3

3. In the extracted folder, make sure that the following configuration files are updated to suit your environment:

   • config/config.yaml
   • config/logging.properties

4. Update the configuration file config/config.yaml for IBM MQ Appliance. The default configuration file is config/config.yaml.

5. Complete one of the following steps:

   • Copy the config/config-mqappliance.yaml file to config/config.yaml.

   • Use the environment variable DC_CONFIG to specify the configuration file, for example:

     export DC_CONFIG=config/config-mqappliance.yaml
     

Sample configuration file

A sample configuration file shared in the archive to monitor IBM MQ Appliance metrics on Instana in the following snippet:

host.system: mq_appliance
instances:
  - appliance.host: testbox1.mqappliance.com
    appliance.user: admin
    appliance.password: xxxxxxxx
    #Data collector properties:
    poll.interval: 10
    callback.interval: 5
    otel.backend.url: http://127.0.0.1:4317
    #otel.backend.using.http: true

Run the Data Collector with the following command according to your current system:

nohup ./bin/otel-dc-host

The following parameters are used in the configuration file for Host Data Collectors.

Table 1. IBM MQ Appliance parameters

Parameter	Scope	Description	Example values
appliance.host	mq_appliance	The hostname for IBM MQ Appliance	testbox1.mqappliance.com
appliance.user	mq_appliance	The username for IBM MQ Appliance	admin
appliance.password	mq_appliance	The password for IBM MQ Appliance	password1

To view metrics on the Instana UI, click Infrastructure. IBM MQ Appliance is displayed as OTEL Host. Select IBM MQ Appliance and click Open Dashboard.