My mid-range accounting is missing data

Like many of the questions I get asked, it started off as a simple question.

“Over a day, what people and machines are using this queue?”  Simple I said.  Just use the accounting data.

Problem 1

I had a program which puts a message to a clustered queue on a remote queue manager.  The message flows to the server and a reply is sent back.  I thought I would check it works.  No it didn’t.

The accounting data has my program, but it recorded a message put to the SYSTEM.CLUSTER.TRANSMIT.QUEUE, and a message got from my reply queue, so I cannot tell what queue was used, but I can tell how many bytes were processed

Problem 2

My application doing just a publish did not show up in the accounting data.

I used the samples amqspub, and amqssub to publish, and subscribe respectively.

The accounting data had a record for the amqssub, getting from a queue, but there was no record for the publishing application.

As Morag kindly pointed out, you can tell how many publishes you did from the MQI accounting data, but not to which topic.

Ive started looking at the activity trace, but this looks like a heavyweight solution to the simple question.

Problem 3

Someone else pointed out that if you want to know the channel name, and IP address of the application using a queue, you have to do some extra work.

• Collect the MQI accounting
• Process queue accounting and MQI accounting, and use the common field connectionId to merge the data

Using amqsevt to display the accounting data in json format you get

“eventData” : {
“queueMgrName” : “QMC”,
“startDate” : “2020-04-17”,
“startTime” : “09.43.23”,
“endDate” : “2020-04-17”,
“endTime” : “10.18.58”,
“commandLevel” : 913,
“connectionId” : “414D5143514D432020202020202020201361995E0A24A923”,
“sequenceNumber” : 1,
“applName” : “server”,
“processId” : 29103,
“threadId” : 11,
“userIdentifier” : “colinpaice”,
   “connDate” : “2020-04-17”,
   “connTime” : “09.12.16”,
   “connectionName” : “127.0.0.1”,
   “channelName” : “COLIN”,

Where the bold text is for the data only in the MQI accounting information.

It looks like the MQI accounting record is produced before the Queue accounting record.

You will need to save the connectionId key with the connection specific information.  When the queue accounting record is processed, use the connectionId to look up the information and append it to the queue record.  If many queues are being used, you may get multiple queue accounting records – so you cannot simply delete the connection key and connection specific information.