IBM MQ Reviews

I use MQ MFT for asynchronous communication – file and message transfers. I also frequently use IBM MQ for its queuing mechanisms and queue management.

IBM MQ is good for system integration within our organization. 

If we need to do batch metadata transfers – involving APIs and MQ – we can do that as long as the source and target systems support MQ. 

However, for anything without MQ, especially when we need asynchronous communication, we have to rely on custom-developed services. It's like that.

The performance is good.

We are a bank whose core banking system is not so advanced. It is still running on an AS/400 system. Credit Card system is are deployed on IBM mainframes. About 70 to 80 percent of the bank's core systems rely on IBM AS/400 and mainframes. The enterprise service bus is used in conjunction with MQ to break synchronous web service /TCP calls into asynchronous MQ calls and expose them a web services-based or API-based service for both internal and external customers. 

As part of enterprise architecture principles, we have enforced all connectivity to be service/ interface based by using ESB, MFT or API. Minimize the point to point connectivity.

We are using dedicated IBM power/pure-app servers to run IBM Integration Bus, IBM MQ, and WebSphere Application Server. These are the three components being used for the bank's enterprise service bus.

People have started using the likes of Kafka, Spark and other new messaging technologies. But when you take the likes of banks into consideration, which mostly are running on mainframes and AS/400, implementing advanced technologies are not an easy job. Getting an MQ-certified guy is not that difficult in the ASEAN market. There are a lot of certified professionals. That's one of the reasons we still use MQ for most of our messaging. We are still looking at open-source deployments but we have not yet implemented anything like that because of the knowledge GAP & dependency on the existing products. We do not have a dedicated team to take on that task yet.

With IBM MQ still in the bank, and a dedicated team which has expertise in it, we really cut down the time-to-market, from a few months to a few weeks. The development framework is already there. If business comes up with requirements, technology team already know what needs to be done. And by building the in-house team, it gives us the facility where we don't need to ask the IBM guys or other vendors in the market to help us every time we have a new requirement.

Another way MQ has improved the way our organization functions is customer notification. Whenever payments are happening, such as incoming payments to the bank, we need to notify the customer. With MQ we can actually do that asynchronously. There are requirements for notifying customers on a real-time base & also for each and every payment sometimes, once a day. These are be enabled with the help of MQ.

In addition, there are fewer failures during the end-to-end payment process. MQ comes in very handy because we don't lose messages in transit (message persistence). It gives us the ability to store and forward messages when required. We heavily rely on MQ for these kinds of requirements.

Also, we have certain applications that want to receive the messages in both production and the disaster-recovery data center at the same time. Without MQ in the picture, it would have been very difficult for us to configure that. MQ Publish subscribe capability is very helpful in that scenario.

MQ has helped to reduce integration costs, mostly by acquiring the enterprise license of MQ. We can actually set up multiple MQ servers in the same environment and each MQ server is dedicated to a particular application. We also use MQ up to a level where the messages are coming from multiple host systems and they go back to a single channel. When written back, the response goes to the exact host that had sent the request (Message Affinity). Without a tool and without a messaging architecture that is as good as MQ's, it would take a lot of time in hard-coding to achieve that. Prior to the team being set up and having these frameworks in place, it took roughly two to three months to deliver any of these integrations. Now it takes three to four weeks. It has helped reduce the effort and man-hours by half.

During my tenure, there was a transition to using IBM MQ due to its compatibility with IBM mainframe systems, which was beneficial for projects involving message queuing systems, particularly for clients like Volkswagen. I've handled various tasks related to IBM MQ, including testing connections, configuring and installing the system, setting up high availability and disaster recovery solutions, and providing administration support. Additionally, I've conducted training courses on IBM MQ.

One of the most crucial aspects for us is ensuring no data loss, and IBM MQ excels in this area, especially in banking environments where reliability is paramount. The feature I find most effective for ensuring message delivery without loss is the backup threshold. This feature allows for automatic retries of transactional messages within a specified threshold. For instance, if the backup threshold is set to five, IBM MQ will automatically retry sending the message up to five times. If unsuccessful, the message is then sent to the backout queue, indicating that it has been attempted multiple times. This flexibility allows us to handle message delivery failures by either discarding, logging, or retrying the message using mediation patterns.

The security features of IBM MQ have met our data protection requirements well. We utilize encryption with SSL keys to ensure data encryption. Additionally, many companies prefer using MQ connections with SSL challenges for added security. The integration with operating systems like Linux and authentication with Active Directory or Open Endpoint of Microsoft has made security configuration straightforward.

We are using version 9.2. The solution is deployed on the cloud and Azure is the provider.

There are four people in my company who are working with IBM MQ.

IBM MQ is robust compared to other products in the market. It also gives you support from the IBM team. We can connect to the IBM technical team in case of any production fault or errors.

For security, we have IBM MQ instead of any other products.

We use it in a number of our applications for message queuing. As a broker dealer, it gives us the ability to queue things up and to send them out at a different time; and it works really well. We go to different reports, and get options and other features from other areas, so we need to queue up the MQ piece of it, have it wait, and then release it when we're ready to release it. That's a great feature.

It gives us flexibility when it comes to offering different projects or different types of solutions to customers. Instead of somebody having to sit back and wait for something, we give them the option now to be able to say, "Hey, we can give you these 10 things, and you can get all 10 back," without having them get six now, and come back later to get something else. They can get everything at one time and it looks like one portfolio of stuff versus it being six or seven different things at one time. MQ gives us that feature.

I haven't used 100% of the IBM product. That said, the message transformation is very good. My application may not always be running, yet even if it is off, whenever I stick on my applications, I get all the messages that I'm supposed to get. Also, the sending functionality of the application may not always be on. I can keep sending the message, and they will get my messages when their applications turn on.

The initial setup is easy.

The GUI part could be better. The command line part is fine if the person knows the commands. However, we started using it on the GUI. It needs more direction, and it needs to be easier to understand. If the connectivity is not happening between the receiver and sender, it would be ideal to have some kind of a GUI that helps me to find the issue. Right now, whenever the connection is not happening, I use the debug a lot, and I use it to see configurations. I'd rather just have a message in the GUI that can say, for example, "The port is not enabled. The port is wrong." 

I used to get an issue with the connection. Maybe the configurations are perfect. However, the issue is on the other side, where maybe the component is down. I will only come to know that when I ping or ask the other person. Instead of that step, if there was a GUI that would tell me exactly what the issue is would make troubleshooting clear.

In general, they need better visibility and not just the GUI design side. They need something that elaborates to the customer or user where the issue is. 

Technical support needs to be faster and more knowledgeable. 

We use it as our enterprise messaging bus, not from the transformation use cases. It's mainly from the messaging use cases only. We use it for connecting to mainframes predominantly.

It was the main messaging bus for us for a very long time. Therefore, we have applications connecting, and even some of the modern applications are still using MQ. From a company's productivity perspective, we see a lot of benefits. It's all point-to-point connectivity. For any point-to-point messaging needs, MQ is very good.

I like its ease of administration. We just recently moved to the MQ appliance and the high availability (HA) feature is outstanding. We're really, really pleased with it and the power of the appliance itself. When you throw more work at it, the faster it goes.

For example, when you're doing maintenance, you can fail over the entire group of queue managers in that HA group or you can fail them individually if you'd like. So, it's very helpful that way. But that's the manual fail over. The automatic fail over is what we are really interested in. We did have an appliance go down. Everything failed over and none of our clients knew of it. So it was very good. We were very pleased with that.

The user interface is good. The command line version of it, MQ CLI, is good. The web user interface is really handy; really a good feature.

It updated everything. We started with Version 7 with Linux and now, with the appliance, it seems to be bringing us more into the 21st century so to speak.