subject: WMQ – Is Your Business Reputation Hurting Because of Messaging Issues? [print this page] WebSphere MQ (WMQ) is one of the most trusted middleware solutions on the market. It is the de facto industry standard for asynchronous application integration. The technical merits of this product have rightfully earned it a position as a trusted consistent application interface. WMQ is flexible and cost effective, able to meet the needs of both financial, industrial and retail based businesses with equal consistency.
Assured message delivery helps protect a business' reputation, something all businesses must consider. Despite the fact that WMQ is an excellent tool, it does not provide visibility into whether the applications it interacts with are available, meeting your service level agreements (SLAs) and performing up to expectation. WMQ handles message queue management, transactions and application integration.
Message delivery is a complex process, involving considerable interaction between various interfaces. It is quite typical for IT environment, which may have commercial software applications, web-based applications, applications running on CICS on the mainframe, .NET framework Windows applications and Java web applications running on Application Servers to be interconnected using WMQ. Acquiring visibility into the WebSphere MQ middleware layer is essential. Why? Because your applications communicate with each other via transactions and most often these interlinking transactions run over WMQ. Deep visibility into WMQ is essential in order to track all of your transactions and the interdependencies between your applications. If a problem develops in WebSphere MQ, it will impact every IT dependent operation in the business. When messages end up in the dead letter queue transactions don't complete. But the problem doesn't stop there. Transactions that fail to complete precipitate additional problems. IT staff are unaware that a problem is developing until the flood of calls to the service desk overwhelms the staff in that department. Then the mad race to trace what went wrong and where it went wrong begins.
This is too late. Your business reputation has already been injured. Your customer's don't care why their transactions aren't completing. They want their interaction with your business to be trouble-free.
How can you resolve this issue? You can maintain peak productivity within WebSphere MQ by choosing a tool that gives IT management visibility into how the applications intersecting WebSphere MQ are interacting with it. The tool exists in a technology known as application performance management.
Application performance management became possible when complex event processing (CEP) became organized around 1999. In the 11 years since, CEP engines have developed to encompass four major areas1) event-driven simulation; 2) networking; 3) active databases; and 4) event-processing middleware.
The CEP engine is the core component to stopping the hits on your business reputation. It is what drives application performance management. A CEP engine allows IT to build and manage industry specific event-driven information systems, including a system that manages WebSphere MQ.
The number of players in the application performance management arena is growing. Nastel Technologies, Inc. is one company that has been providing visibility into WebSphere MQ middleware messaging for almost 11 years now. Their AutoPilot CEP engine has only improved as it has moved from its roots as a program that primarily focused on event-processing middleware to an engine that encompasses all four areas of CEP.
When you put AutoPilot into place, your business can know when production is veering towards disaster long before a single customer is impacted. You can tell the difference between "business normal" and "business abnormal" automatically.
You will be amazed at the difference it will make when you are no longer dealing with the impact of latent messages to your business. AutoPilot with its complex event processing engine will empower real-time 360o situational awareness into every aspect of your IT enterprise, especially that WMQ middleware hub that ties everything together.
WMQ Is Your Business Reputation Hurting Because of Messaging Issues?
By: Denise Rutledge
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