Monitor IBM MQ with Instana

This paper explores how to configure Instana and MQ to monitor the IBM MQ running on OpenShift.

Instana sensor connects to the detected MQ to get the monitoring metrics. Typically the connection need to be authenticated againt the OS. However, when MQ is running on container, the default OS based authentication is no longer available. To authenticate the connection and further authorize it with the right permission, we will use mutual TLS, certificate based authentication for the Instana sensor.

Configuration for Instana MQ sensor

The Instana agent has been deployed as instana-agent helm chart. The agent is running on each nodes of the cluster as Daemonset. If the MQ is running on any of the node, the Instana agent will discover it and start to monitor it based on a set of predefined configuration. The configuration is created as a configMap. The following is a sample configMap for the MQ monitoring,

kind: ConfigMap
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: instana-agent
  namespace: instana-agent
data:
  cluster_name: ocp-dev49
  configuration.yaml: |
    com.instana.plugin.ibmmq:
      enabled: true
      poll_rate: 5
      queueManagers:
        qm1:
            channel: INSTANA
            #username:
            #password: 
            queuesRegex: '.*'
            availabilityZone: 'IBM MQ'…