Using the WebSphere MQ Services snap-in

The WebSphere MQ icon is in the system tray on the server and is overlaid with a color-coded status symbol, which can have one of the following meanings:

Green

Healthy; no alerts at present

Blue

Indeterminate; WebSphere MQ is starting up or shutting down

Yellow

Alert; one or more services are failing or have already failed

When you click on the icon with your right mouse button, a context menu appears. From this menu, select the MQSeries Services option to bring up the MMC. The WebSphere MQ Services snap-in is already loaded and is ready to use.

You can save any changes you make to this console view so that each time you start up the WebSphere MQ Services snap-in from the task bar, it appears as you last saved it.

The first time you start the WebSphere MQ Services snap-in, each queue manager you currently have defined shows the services belonging to that queue manager on the right-hand side of the console window. The WebSphere MQ Services snap-in always contains an up-to-date list of the current set of queue managers. You do not have to add or remove any definitions manually. There are icons for the trace and alert monitor functions in addition to those for the queue managers. The trace and alert monitor functions are special services that do not belong to individual queue managers but to the system as a whole.

You cannot stop the alert monitor application. The trace service, when set to automatic startup, starts before any other services or queue managers.

Using the WebSphere MQ alert monitor application

The WebSphere MQ alert monitor is an error detection tool that identifies and records problems with WebSphere MQ on a local machine. The alert monitor displays information about the current status of the local installation of a WebSphere MQ server.

From the WebSphere MQ alert monitor, you can:

• Access the WebSphere MQ Services snap-in directly
• View information relating to all outstanding alerts
• Shut down the WebSphere MQ service on the local machine
• Route alert messages over the network to a configurable user account, or to a Windows workstation or server

Looking at WebSphere MQ alert monitor information

If the task bar icon indicates that an alert has arisen, double click on the icon to open the Alert Monitor display. This dialog shows a tree view, grouped by queue manager, of all the alerts that are currently outstanding. Expand the nodes of the tree to see which services are alerted and look at the following pieces of information relating to the service:

• The date and time of the most recent alert for the service
• The command line that failed
• The error message describing why the service failed

WebSphere MQ Services snap-in recovery facilities

If you have set your queue managers to start automatically during system startup, you can configure the behavior of the WebSphere MQ Services snap-in, in the appropriate property pages, to take one of several actions if one or more queue managers fail:

• Restart the queue managers.
• Execute a program. You might like to set it up to notify you of a failure, either through a pager alert or by e-mail.
• Restart the server.
• Log the fact that a failure has occurred, but take no action.