Tag: chart

mqweb charts look like “work in progress”

One of the widgets you can add to a dashboard page is a chart.   This can subscribe to the published monitoring data, and displays it as a line chart.

The topics are described in my post  What data is available with the Published Monitoring data, and include

  • Platform central processing units
      • CPU performance – platform wide  …
    • CPU performance – running queue manager …
  • Platform persistent data stores
    • Disk usage – platform wide …
    • Disk usage – running queue managers …
    • Disk usage – queue manager recovery logs …
  • API usage statistics
    • MQCONNs and MQDISCs …
    • etc
  • API per-queue usage statistics
    • MQOPEN and MQCLOSE …
    • etc

The data is published every 10 seconds or so, and the charts are refreshed around every 10 seconds.

These charts seem to be a work in progress or demonstration of technology.

After you’ve added the widget you need to click in the wheel to configure the chart.

You can select the data you want to display from drop downs

  • Select top left, for the “resource class” (major category), top right for the “resource type” (minor category) second row left for the “resource element” (detail), second row right for any object.
  • For those topics that need an object, such as a queue name, you must give  a specific object, such as CP9999, not as CP999*.
  • If you change what is being displayed, you have to select all of the data, for example,  I was collecting API usage statistics, get count per queue, and wanted to collect API usage statistics (on all queues).  I found I was changing the major category, clicking save, and getting the wrong data displayed.
    • Click on the cog
    • Select API resource class: “API usage statistics“
    • Resource type: defaults to “MQCONN and MQDISC“, so select “MQGET“
    • The Resource element defaults to “Interval total destructive get- count”.  I want this, so select Save.

View finder=select time range

From the cog, you can select or hide the “view finder”.  I would have called “view finder”  “select time range”.  If you “show” view finder, instead of one chart 6 cm high, the main chart is squashed into 5 cm, and there is a 1 cm squashed version below it.  It took me a while to find what this view finder is for.  If you click+hold on the “view finder” graph, and drag left or right,  the mini chart becomes a grey box with a slider.  Drag, right or left,  allows you to select the range which is displayed in the big chart.

  • To reset the window click somewhere else in the view finder chart.
  • As the small chart displays the whole time period available to you, you can drag the slider to an interesting area to allow you to drill into it.
  • You can click and drag the time range bar/gap in the view finder, so you get the same time duration, but at an earlier or later time.
  • As more data is added to the right hand side of the chart,  the time slide moves to the left over time
  • I could not find how to display just the last 5 minutes worth of data, as the window moved.
  • With the <variable name=”ltpaExpiration” value=”30″/> configuration, you get logged off after 30 minutes.  With certificates you get logged on again, but the time interval is reset, and you lose the historical data.  In this case you get no more than 30 minutes worth of data displayed.

Have data for more than one queue manager on a chart

  • If you have more than one queue manager active, you can display data from more than one queue manager.
  • A queue manager has to be active to be able to add it to a chart.   You can then stop the queue manager, and the chart will remember your selection.
  • You can select a colour for each queue manager, so for example have QMA in red, and QMB in blue, on the same chart.
  • On a chart, if you click on the circle in front of a queue manager, the circle changes from solid to empty. Click again and it goes solid.   When circle is solid the data is displayed on the chart, when it is empty, the data for that queue manager is not displayed.
    • The displayed time range may change.
  • If you move your cursor over the chart, a grey line will appear, and jump to data points, so you can see the data at that point.  It only jumped to data for one colour.
  • The number at the top of the y axis is the maximum value  displayed.

Some descriptions could be clearer

  • Some of the descriptions could be clearer, for example “interval total destructive get – count” is clear,  but “Failed MQGET – count”, is presumable for the interval as well.  I think these come from the published data.   (I found it easier to create better descriptions when I processed the published monitoring data)

The data for multiple queue managers may not be synchronised

  • For example “Platform CPU,  CPU performance – platform wide” when I had two queue managers, gave me two lines, which tend to follow each other.   The data is collected at different times (for example 10:00:03, and 10:00:07), so the data is different at each point.
  • The answer is easy – for system wide metrics just select one queue manager.

You can rename charts

  • If you hover over the title, you can click on the pencil to rename the widget.  If you clear the name it resets it to the default.
  • I changed it to “COLINs LAPTOP CPU”, then, later,  changed the chart to disk space usage.  The title “COLINs LAPTOP CPU ” was no longer relevant, so I clicked on the pencil icon, and cleared the title, and got the default chart description back.

Refresh window

  • If you refresh the window, all the charts are reset and historical data may be lost.
  • If a queue manager was stopped and restarted, refreshing the window will cause the subscription for all of the charts in the window to be reissued.

Some “hmm interesting” observations.

  • Some of the y axis data was strange.   When starting to collect some data, I had number of gets 2050, when the number of gets in the last hour was about 5.   This is from the published data.  Since data was published for the queue (over 1 week ago) there were 2050 gets from the queue since them.   The published data reported this value, and reset it.
  • Because I had <variable name=”ltpaExpiration” value=”30″/>, after 30 minutes the windows gets logged off.  Because I was using digital certificates it automatically logs on again.
  • I stopped one queue manager and restarted it.  In some charts, the data for that queue manager stopped being displayed. On other charts it was displayed successfully.
    • You need to go to the settings cog, and click save.   This reissues the subscription.
  • If you click on a the box with an arrow in it (“browse data”), by the cog, you can display the data for that chart.  Select a queue manager from the pull down list.   If you type “a” you can select all of the data – you cannot copy it to the clip board.
    • If you click on the column heading ( Timestamp or Data) you can sort ascending or descending.
  • If you select API stats for a specific queue, it does not display which queue is being displayed.
  • Sometimes data is missing.  I could see a line was missing some data.   Using the “browse data” box, I could see one queue manager had data from 13:14,  another had data from 13:15.   Both queue managers were running while I had my lunch.
  • The chart “MQ trace file system – bytes in use” reported 16KB of data – when I had over 160KB of *.trc data.  If if was for the file system, then it is a very small file system.  I do not understand this metric.