IBM MQ Reviews

I've used other solutions, but the most valuable features of this solution are the search capabilities, consolidating the data and searching through the data. I think that these are some of the key things.

For this organization, it was the first log management solution. So, it definitely gave us the ability to search through the data when we had events. We could search based on the identity of the person, or the machine, or the IP address. We could do a lot of different searches.

We could also do payload searches and depending on how much capacity you have, you can do quite a lot with it.

I want to see a three-dimensional perspective to the data. I don't want to see just an event perspective to the data. I want to be able to identify a user and within clicks, know the whole activity of the user. I don't want to see it in events. I want to see it in the relevant information.

There needs to be a little bit more of investment for enhancing the user interface. That is the main thing, i.e., to make it represent the state of the actual incident response and how you would troubleshoot an incident. It was a major position by IBM when they bought it. But, we see a lot of things being done around the Cognitive side, around the Watson side, but what we're not seeing growth in, is the actual tools interface and usability.

We wanted to be able to see seamless identification of log sources, seamless categorization, normalizing of log sources and seamless alerts. All those things that are required for solution maturing, it has to be able to take data and make sense of it by itself, without a lot of input. Those are the areas that they can really improve it.

It's been stable. Stability hasn't been a problem, as long as you have enough capacity. It's all about sizing it right for the size of your environment.

We drop packets every day. So depending on how our log volume increases or reduces, you see the impact on the packets being dropped.

We've used it and it hasn't been great. It didn't seem like we could get the answers we needed without having to use professional services. For a solution like this, there are little things like, how to tune it, how to upgrade it and that as a customer we don't feel the need to use professional services for. We want to be able to just find a document on how to upgrade and that has been difficult to find.

We didn't have a previous solution. We inherited it as part of another acquisition, of another purchase from IBM and then we scaled it up to meet our capacity.

I was involved in the setup process. We got the basic functionality working, which is not difficult. It's getting the full value out of this solution that was harder.

From an analytics perspective, it's a good tool but you have to have the resources to own it. It's not only about buying it, nor is it about the capacity, but somebody has to care and feed it. It's not one of those you put it in and you can walk away and just consume the data. If you don't care and feed it, you won't get what you need out of it.

We use it right now for transferring a lot of big files. Sometimes, for some reason, the file doesn't get all the way to the other side. We do it between different cities. MQ keeps track of it and gets it all done. We at least know if it was half-done or not. We also have scheduled jobs through ESB, but it doesn't send that kind of notification to us. It says whether the script has run or not run. That's all we get. This has been a better product.

Besides that, we do a lot of our jobs through it. We queue them and run them.

These files are critical. They have to reach the whole file. Sometimes, a half file gets the same name and gets processed as a half file. The result is like replenishing all those files. The results are really screwy if you get half files. Since started using MQ, we haven't seen this.

In some cases, when a file got transferred, it has same name on both sides. That could have something to do with the product or it could have to do with something else. We are working on it. That's confusing. I would like that improved. If it didn't appear with the same name, that would definitely be better.

We've been using it for 8-10 years.

It's very stable. We've been using it for quite some time now, 8-10 years.

We started with very few. Stability’s good. It's scalable all the way. It meets our requirements.

Technical support is very good. Whenever we have a question, they are very responsive.

We've been using MQ for so many years. It's been really, really working great for us. I recommend it rather than looking at other solutions.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is that the product has to be good. Second, the support has to be really good and the people working with it should be genuine, and not just come up with what you want to hear. They have to be genuine. Sometimes the product is good, the support is good, but the people are not.

For us, the most valuable feature is the fact that we can move data from disparate systems quite easily. It's not a mountain of data for us, because of the nature of our business, but it's critical that we move information through the queues, from many varying different systems.

It makes it much easier to have people from different experience levels be able to interface with one another, without having to be cross-trained on many different platforms. A business benefit is, it can take somebody who's a Windows guy or a Linux guy, and he can fully communicate with the z/OS system, or vice versa, without having to have that extra knowledge of those other systems.

For our internal systems and connecting things together, it works really well. If we're trying to connect to something in the web or other things, we don't use it, because we feel that REST or other APIs are more easily adaptable to that environment. Perhaps; I'm not even sure how MQ could do that.

For instance, one of the things we do is, we collect social media data; the public APIs. We're doing a REST call; we're getting back a JSON object. If there was a way that we could do that, perhaps with MQ; set up a way that it could go out, collect the information that we need, and bring it back as a queue, as opposed to a JSON object. That might be something beneficial.

Stability is a hallmark of the product. It's extremely reliable. We set up a queue and we say, “Go,” and we have virtually zero issues with it. Considering that it's interfacing with multiple different products, it's remarkably reliable.

It's one of those things where, if somebody says there's a problem, you're like, "What? That can't be possible." We really haven't really had any outages to speak of.

We don't have a tremendous transaction volume, but obviously, the scalability is a factor that many large organizations would have to work on. I think that the transaction volume, in some of the testing we've done for performance and things like that, have shown that is a very, extremely reliable product at scale.

I'm not sure that we've really had to use technical support for WebSphere MQ. We’ve figured out how to do it. We've known how to use MQ, set up queues and so on, for a long time. They interface well with our products. We really don't need the support, which I guess is a hallmark of how simple it is to use the product.

We might have had some issues with installation, or some initial setup calls. Once it's gone live, we've really not had to ask for help, had a queue break, or had transmissions not happen.

We've had MQ for a long, long time. It was something that we've always supported.

The people on my team were involved in the initial setup, absolutely. There was a little bit of complexity involved with the mainframe section, around some general ways that the thing is implemented in the system, and things that have to happen early on during the IPL and some other processes that we have. That's the part I'm most familiar with. The other platforms it's run on, I'm not sure.

In general, once we got through some of those issues, it was pretty straightforward.

If you have a lot of internal systems that you rely on passing queue transactional data, and queuing data back and forth between a lot of systems, it's definitely a very reliable, very robust, very easy-to-use product. It's a very eloquent way of providing a solution to the problem of having disparate systems talk to each other.

I think it's a very stable product. It works well. It does exactly what you think it's going to do. It scales well. It's easy for the application people that use it to identify with it, and know what they're doing. My rating is primarily based on all those things, and the reliability.

Honestly, selecting a vendor to work with is different than how we chose a product, in general. Pricing is always an option, but stability, support, the willingness of the vendor to cooperate if you need help, and other things like that are important. It's different than it was a long time ago. Most of the time now, you deal with the fact that companies have only been around for a few years.

It used to be that somebody had to be around 10 or 15 years before you would invest in it and believe in it. Now, very strong companies have only been around for one or two years, and have very vibrant products. When dealing with a vendor, it's how willing they are to listen to the customer; how dynamic they can be in enhancing their products; how quickly they can implement features and functions into their products; how strong their support is if you do have problems; and how well the product operates without having an intense learning curve, or a lot of training necessary. It's how elegantly the vendor delivered the product, the documentation; all those things kind of speak to the vendor themselves.

We don't directly use MQ for cloud, mobile, and devices as part of the internet of things. We use direct REST calls. We use z/OS Connect and other mainframe-related REST services. We're generating APIs in order to connect to the internet, and to connect to cloud-based services.

The most valuable feature is its stability because we're in the financial services; message persistence and reliability, speed, performance. Those are probably the key attributes that we appreciate.

It's incredibly flexible. It's not software that people get into a religion over; where it’s mainframe or distributed. MQ runs; you don't have to worry about what platform it's on. I find that to be very, very useful. It recovers extremely well in disaster recovery, which is very near and dear to our hearts. High availability options are outstanding.

Support is excellent. The team in Hursley are outstanding, very responsive. They listen to suggestions, and they deep dive into problems.

The very mainframe-centric zIIP offload is very critical to me. I appreciate any and all work IBM can do to offload work onto a zIIP engine to reduce my operating costs. I always tell every vendor that answer. It doesn't make a difference if it's IBM or any other vendor. Exploitation of zIIPs is absolutely critical. I'd say that's probably the biggest thing for me right now. That really impacts my price on my total cost of ownership.

Also, and I think IBM's addressing this in the newer versions of MQ, I would like to see improved MQ data sharing. Again, I'm a mainframe guy. MQ in its original flavor didn't lend itself particularly well to data sharing. There was too big of a chance for data loss. With the new version, where they're using more pointers to the data than data itself, I think that's very promising.

I'm a little concerned about scalability. We're still on the older version of MQ. On the mainframe, we're on the older version. I'm not sure where we are in distributed. Page set expansion is a problem for us. We deal a lot with U.S. equity markets. When we're dealing with a lot of message traffic, a lot of market fluctuation, if we reach a page set expansion and MQ basically goes into a halt to expand the pages, that slows us down immeasurably. I know there are larger versions that have larger buffers, larger page sets; we just have to get there.

We're not using MQ to better connect to mobile. The type of business we are doesn't really lend itself to mobile. On the other hand, it is deeply entrenched in our cloud strategy. In terms of the internet of things, I'm going to steal a comment a heard: It really is becoming part of our nervous system. It makes pretty much everything go. We do billions of messages every day. We'd be in a lot of trouble without MQ.

Right now, I'm not seeing any barrier to success. I don’t have anything on that.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are that it has to match a business need. Stability, for me, is incredibly important. Ease of use, installation, and maintenance; I don't want to purchase anything from any vendor where they have to send a team in to install it and get it running. If they have to send in their engineers to install it because they don't think my engineers can do it, I don't want the software. I guess those are big ones.

It's an incredibly reliable, stable product for us. I think there are things our firm can do better. I think we're going to get better at them. Right now, I don't see that as being IBM's challenge, I see it as ours.

As far as specific advice, I would make sure you stay current with the maintenance cycles and the patching. This is one of the things we're looking to improve on. We inevitably seem to get caught being a version behind or a few patch levels behind. Because it is such a rapidly evolving technology, you have to stay on top of the patch levels.

IBM WebSphere MQ is deployed on a Windows machine, as well as almost all of our infrastructure. Windows services read and write to the MQ server - this is the way that we interact with it. All the messages that we put on the queue are also stored in an SQL Databases. A Windows service reads that message from the SQL Database storage and puts it on a queue on a certain channel; these Windows services are running indefinitely, on a loop so any message is read instantly. 

The solution is very easy to work with.

The solution is very stable, it also offers transaction management and support.

The solution offers very good integration with other services. It's one of the great advantages of the service.

We have had it for a long time now - version 7.1, which is not the latest. 

The admin interface of MQ Explorer that is used to interact with the server seems a little bit dated. It makes it somehow difficult to interact with it. It needs a major update to make it more modern and easy to navigate, maybe a web version.

The solution isn't free. There are other solutions, like RabbitMQ, which are open source and absolutely free to use. This open source solution we use it for non-critical processes.

IBM offers a special version that you need to get if you want to transfer files, especially large files. Maybe it should be included in any version.

We've been using the solution for a very long time. It's been at least a decade - about ten years.

The stability of the solution is good. We've never run into any issues.

IBM MQ offers clustering. We don't have this yet, as it hasn't been implemented, however, I know that you can install it in a cluster of servers. 

My understanding is RabbitMQ is also easier to scale. I'm unsure as to how well IBM can scale in comparison.

I've never contacted technical support in the past. I can't speak to their level or service due to the fact that I've never directly dealt with them.

We're also using RabbitMQ. While IBM is more stable, RabbitMQ is easier to work with. 

We've been trying to change our architecture, and RabbitMQ is more appropriate for us as it's easier to put together with microservices.

While I was part of the process for implementing RabbitMQ, which was very simple and straightforward, in the case of IBM, I didn't install it myself. Unfortunately, I cannot explain how easy or difficult it was as I was not part of the experience. My understanding is it's not too difficult.

In terms of maintenance, we have two people from the support team handling that aspect. They can restart the server or look into the queues. They aren't working in shifts, however, if there are issues, one of them is normally available to troubleshooting.

In comparison, for RabbitMQ, we had only one developer that installed it and created the publishers, workers etc. I believe the support will be the same as for IBM. In both cases, there aren't too many people needed for maintenance.

I'd recommend the solution. It's a very stable solution and very resilient. 

If there is not essential data that needs to be transported between services, then I would go for a RabbitMQ, because it's easier in style, and it's free to use. On top of that, you can have it to wrap around everything in a straightforward way.

That said, I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. We've used it for a number of years and it's always worked very well for us.

This product has helped integrate between applications, reduce rework, and costs by reusing working components of existing applications, such as mainframe applications.

At Citibank, for example, they could utilize the already working components in the legacy system and integrate them with web, mobile, and tablet-based applications, instead of developing three separate applications in each of these technologies. This tremendously reduced efforts, costs, errors, and timeline.

• Can process large amount of messages in a small amount of time.
• Integrates between distributed systems: For example, it can help integrate processing between mainframe, client-server, web-based applications by integrating the messages, supporting Service Oriented Architecture.
• It helps avoid rework by using already developed and working features of the application.

Many customers are gravitating towards open source products such as RabbitMQ, or going for a web-based package.

Also, the level of training as well as product marketing for this product are not that great. You rarely find a good training institute that provides training. Many of the architects in several organization are neither aware of the product nor interested in using it. IBM should provide good training on products like this to me and other candidates and post us to the US or UK where we can provide excellent support to the clients using the product.

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Level of support with IBM WebSphere products, including IBM WebSphere Commerce server, IBM WebSphere Portal server, and IBM Websphere Integration server is fantastic.

For clients such as Target, IBM provided excellent support for IBM CICS Web Services, as well as IBM WebSphere Integration server, by having a dedicated IBM team in the USA that provided support.

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Setup has to be done by the team from IBM. Client just needs to enjoy the excellent support.

Pricing could be better, as with all IBM products. But their performance in production, along with security and scalability, will pay returns in the long run.

There are other products available, such as TIBCO ESB, and we have many
clients who are using that.

Middleware family of products such as WebSphere MQ, MB, TIBCO ESB, IBM ESB, and MuleSoft ESB offer excellent choices in architecture and re-engineering of software architecture, and should be the first choice, instead of building from scratch. If anyone recommends rebuilding from scratch, such an architect should not be working for your organization.

IBM needs to protect its products, as well as the engineers and architects who recommend those products.

The way that we use MQ is just for messaging. We have various systems in our organization and we have various applications.

We use our routing feature when the request is coming from the business application. The request goes to the distributive side and it is routed to the right claim instance.

We use MQ in between for messaging. We process the messages we receive and we send the responses back to whoever sent us the message.

That person or application basically picks up the response and distributes it to whoever requested it. The way we design the environment of that instance can leverage any of the environments.

Because we are a 24/7 company, we always want to have a robust solution where we can keep getting messages. There should be no delays, outages, or blockages. Those messages should be coming in seamlessly, transparently, and efficiently.

The way that we envision the future of our organization is that MQ works well. We have MQ local and MQ distributed and we're leveraging both.

The way that we are using the solution may not be utilizing the full version of MQ. However, what is available right now works well for us. We are not looking to expand.

It's very robust. It's stable. Whenever we have a situation where our listener is down for some reason, MQ has the capacity to put those messages into some queues where we can retrieve them later on.

It has those alerts built-in. It tells our operation that the queues are getting filled up and they need some attention. We have those kinds of features turned on.

It is very scalable.

Our team is very well versed in MQ and they're always able to solve all the problems. In fact, last year we moved to iApps, and they were able to work with IBM. They were able to solve whatever roadblocks we had.

We have our own support team. Whenever we have some situation, we go to them. If they're unable to solve it, then they reach out to IBM.

I'm not aware of the pricing. That's something others deal with, but they do tell me that it is expensive. I don't know how much it is.

We have an ELA contract with IBM and everything is included. It's not like MQ has a different price, and different products have difference prices. Everything is done as part of one big contract

Customers need to look at their design and carefully select the product. They should look at the product capabilities and change the design accordingly to work with the product.

Don't expect a lot of things from the product. You need to trust your design, your solution, and your app. This product just helps you to move around and navigate your data.

Your product has to be solid to process those elements. If I am unable to put the message in a queue, then if MQ sends me a message and I'm unable to pull the message and process it, then I would not blame MQ. It is my product or app that is not working. The solution is just an interface. It's just messaging. It's sending and retrieving messages, and that's it.

We use MQ just for transferring messages to and from applications. We get subscriptions, queues, topics and all the app teams love it. It is an easy way to transfer messages, so that's commonly used as a solution for us.

The benefit is, it is easy to use. You subscribe to your queue, they get the message and then they do what they need to with it. It goes on or it ends, either way; it is very easy to use.

From what I understand from the team, mainly just the security piece needs to be improved, but it sounds like they already have that resolved.

Obviously, there's always a bug or two here and there that could be fixed, but they're constantly evolving and improving it.

I know that they're coming out next with IBM MQ Version 9 or 10, so they are always updating the versions. It is a very stable product.

We did experience some security issues with the older versions. As of now, people can log in as root, i.e., whoever wants to log in as root, they can. However, with the new version, they're taking that away.

I have not used any technical support for this solution.

Usually we just go with the IBM products, so I don't think we've looked outside that much for another messaging solution.

From our perspective, we use the IBM suite. They provide great support when we need it. They're always evolving and are very stable, so all around it is a very good suite from IBM.