Application activity trace

Application activity trace produces detailed information about the behavior of applications connected to a queue manager. It traces the behavior of an application and provides a detailed view of the parameters used by an application as it interacts with IBM MQ resources. It also shows the sequence of MQI calls issued by an application.

Use Application activity trace when you require more information than is provided by Event monitoring, Message monitoring, Accounting and statistics messages, and Real-time monitoring.

IBM MQ supports two methods of collecting application activity trace data.

• Central collection of application activity trace information, where application activity trace is collected and read by writing activity trace PCF messages to the system queue SYSTEM.ADMIN.TRACE.ACTIVITY.QUEUE.
• Subscription to activity trace data, written to special IBM MQ system topics.

Note that activity trace is not supported by IBM MQ for z/OS .

As we can now specify application names on most of the programming languages that IBM MQsupports, refer to Specify the application name in supported programming languages for more information.

• Configure central collection of application activity trace information
  An application activity trace message is a PCF message. You configure activity trace using a configuration file. To configure central collection of application activity trace information, you set the ACTVTRC queue manager attribute. We can override this setting at connection level using MQCONNX options, or at application stanza level using the activity trace configuration file.
• Subscribing to application activity trace information
  From IBM MQ Version 9.0, we can dynamically subscribe to application activity trace information as an alternative to collecting the information through queue manager level configuration.
• Application activity trace message reference
  Use this page to obtain an overview of the format of application activity trace messages and the information returned in these messages

Parent topic: Monitor the IBM MQ network