Troubleshooting: Gaining access to queue manager data

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.

Before you begin

This topic describes a manual procedure for collecting troubleshooting information. To simplify and standardize the collection of such data, consider using the IBM MQ container inspector tool instead. For more information, see Collecting troubleshooting information with IBM MQ container inspector.

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

About this task

To help with troubleshooting, you can access the data stored on the Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) associated with a given queue manager. To do this, you use 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
```