Checking the daisy chain around my MQ network

Young children collect flowers and chain them to make a circle and so make a daisy chain.

People also talk about daisy chaining electrical extension leads together to make a very long lead out of lots of small leads.

In MQ we can also have daisy chains.  One use is to check all of the links are working, and there are no delays on the channels.

If an application puts a message onto the Clustered Request Queue(BQ) on QMA, it goes around and the reply can be got from the Reply queue, then we have checked all the links are working; we have daisy chained the requests.

Once I Once I got it working the definitions were simple.

 

On QMB

DEFINE QR(BQ) RQMNAME(QMC) RNAME(CQ) CLUSTER(MYCLUSTER)

On QMC

DEFINE QREMOTE(CQ) CLUSTER(MYCLUSTER) RQMNAME(QMA) RNAME(REPLY)

On QMA

DEFINE QL(REPLY)

Once we have set the definitions up I could can use the MQ utility dspmqrte to show us the path.  For example

• dspmqrte puts a message to the BQ .  This is a clustered queued on QMB,  It reports the queue BQ is being used, and stores the message on SYSTEM.CLUSTER.XMIT.QUEUE.
• On QMA the channel TO.B gets the message from the SCTQ and sends it
• On QMB the channel TO.B says put this to BQ, which is defined as CQ, and stores it on the SCTQ.
• On QMB the channel TO.C gets the message from the SCTQ and sends it to QMC.
• On QMC the channel TO.C says put this to CQ, which is defined as REPLY,  and stores if on SCTQ
• On QMC the channel TO.A gets the message from the SCTQ and sends it to QMA.
• On QMA the channel TO.A puts it to the Reply queue.

I used dspmqrte -m QMA -q BQ …, and it worked like magic.   I requested summary information(-v summary) and I got the following output, which shows the intermediate queues used.

AMQ8653I: DSPMQRTE command started with options ‘-m QMA -qBQ -rqCP0001 -rqm QMA -v summary -d yes -w5’.
AMQ8659I: DSPMQRTE command successfully put a message on queue ‘SYSTEM.CLUSTER.TRANSMIT.QUEUE’, queue manager ‘QMA’.
AMQ8674I: DSPMQRTE command is now waiting for information to display.
AMQ8666I: Queue ‘SYSTEM.CLUSTER.TRANSMIT.QUEUE’ on queue manager ‘QMA’.
AMQ8666I: Queue ‘SYSTEM.CLUSTER.TRANSMIT.QUEUE’ on queue manager ‘QMB’.
AMQ8666I: Queue ‘SYSTEM.CLUSTER.TRANSMIT.QUEUE’ on queue manager ‘QMC’.
AMQ8666I: Queue ‘REPLY’ on queue manager ‘QMA’.
AMQ8652I: DSPMQRTE command has finished.

Note, specifying RQMNAME is not required, and clustering will pick a queue manager which hosts the queue.  This means that you may be testing a different path to what you expected.  By using it you specify the route.

When I stopped QMC and retried the dspmqrte command , I got

AMQ8653I: DSPMQRTE command started with options ‘-m QMA -qBQ -rqCP0001 -rqm QMA -v summary -d yes -w5’.
AMQ8659I: DSPMQRTE command successfully put a message on queue ‘SYSTEM.CLUSTER.TRANSMIT.QUEUE’, queue manager ‘QMA’.
AMQ8674I: DSPMQRTE command is now waiting for information to display.
AMQ8666I: Queue ‘SYSTEM.CLUSTER.TRANSMIT.QUEUE’ on queue manager ‘QMA’.
AMQ8666I: Queue ‘SYSTEM.CLUSTER.TRANSMIT.QUEUE’ on queue manager ‘QMB’.
AMQ8652I: DSPMQRTE command has finished.

It does not report that there were any problems;  it just did not report two hops.

To see if there are problem, I think the best thing to do is pipe the output into a file

dspmqrte… > today

and compare this with a good day.

diff today goodday -d  gave me the differences – so I could see there was a problem because I was missing

> AMQ8666I: Queue ‘SYSTEM.CLUSTER.TRANSMIT.QUEUE’ on queue manager ‘QMC’.
> AMQ8666I: Queue ‘REPLY’ on queue manager ‘QMA’.

---

I had tried to define a clustered queue alias queues instead of a remote queue.  I got responses like

Feedback: UnknownAliasBaseQ, MQRC_UNKNOWN_ALIAS_BASE_Q, RC2082.