WebSphere MQ facilities

The WebSphere MQ product logs can be useful in diagnosing errors that occur in your integration node network. For example, if the IBM Integration Toolkit cannot communicate with an integration node, the channels that connect them might be wrongly configured, or experiencing network problems.

On distributed systems, operational messages in a user-readable format (such as queue manager started), are written to the error logs in the errors subdirectory of the queue manager directory.

First Failure Support Technology (FFST) records are normally severe, unrecoverable errors, and indicate either a configuration problem with the system, or a WebSphere MQ internal error. FFST files are named AMQnnnnn.mm.FDC, where nnnnn is the ID of the process that is reporting the error, and mm is a sequence number.

On Windows, records are written to the install_dir\errors directory. Operational messages and FFST records are also written to the Event log.

On UNIX and Linux® systems, records are written to the /var/mqm/errors directory. WebSphere MQ writes one line for each FFST containing the name of the FFST file to the syslog, but no operational messages.

WebSphere MQ provides information about errors, warnings, and other significant occurrences in queue managers in the form of instrumentation event messages.

When active, these event messages are sent to event queues that can be monitored or triggered. You might find it appropriate to activate WebSphere MQ events when you are investigating the performance, or unexpected behavior, of your integration node network.