Integrating with the IBM Cloud Pak for Integration Operations Dashboard

The ability to trace transactions through IBM Cloud Pak for Integration is provided by the Operations Dashboard.

About this task

Enable integration with the Operations Dashboard installs an MQ API exit to your queue manager. The API exit will send tracing data to the Operations Dashboard data store, about messages which are flowing through the queue manager.

Note that only messages which are sent using MQ client bindings are traced.

Procedure

1. Deploy a queue manager with tracing enabled

   By default, the tracing feature is disabled.

   If we are deploying using the IBM Cloud Pak for Integration Platform Navigator, then we can enable tracing while deploying, by setting Enable Tracing to On, and setting the Tracing Namespace to the namespace where the Operations Dashboard is installed. For more information on deploying a queue manager, see Deploying a queue manager using the IBM Cloud Pak for Integration Platform Navigator

   If we are deploying using the OpenShift CLI or OpenShift web console, then we can enable tracing with the following YAML snippet:

   spec:
     tracing:
       enabled: true
       namespace: <Operations_Dashboard_Namespace

   Important: The queue manager will not start until MQ has been registered with the Operations Dashboard (see the next step).

   Note that when this feature is enabled, it will run two sidecar containers ("Agent" and "Collector") in addition to the queue manager container. The images for these sidecar containers will be available in the same registry as the main MQ image, and will use the same pull policy and pull secret. There are additional settings available to configure CPU and memory limits.
2. If this is the first time a queue manager with Operations Dashboard integration has been deployed in this namespace, then we need to Register with the Operations Dashboard. Registering creates a Secret object which the queue manager Pod needs to successfully start.

Parent topic: Deploying IBM MQ certified containers using the IBM MQ Operator