The Monitor utility is a MessageQ application that allows you to monitor and control the performance of your MessageQ for Windows NT message queuing system.
Using the Monitor utility requires that you be connected to a bus and group. If you set the DMQ_BUS_ID and DMQ_GROUP_ID environment variables prior to invoking the Monitor utility, you will connect to that bus and a group when you invoke the Monitor utility. If you do not set the environment variables before invoking the Monitor utility, you must connect to the bus and group from the command line or from the Monitor utility .
Using the Monitor utility, you can:
To start the Monitor utility:
Invoking the Monitor Utility
To monitor your application's messaging capabilities, you need to collect statistics on the queue and link activities of the groups. Because statistic collection is not automatically started when you open the Monitor utility, you must enable statistics gathering using the Enable Statistics option in the Manage menu. To disable statistics gathering, click again on the Enable Statistics option in the Manage menu to remove the check mark. Statistics stop being collected when you exit the Monitor utility.
At any time while statistics are enabled, they can be reset for a selected group's links and queues using the Statistics and Reset items under the Manage menu. Link and queue statistics can be reset either individually or as a whole. Reset zeroes out the statistics collection counters. Using Reset allows you to view your application's messaging traffic over short-term periods, which can be useful for detecting messaging bottlenecks.
The Monitor utility allows you to enable or disable quotas on permanent queues that you have defined in the Configure Queues dialog of the Configuration Utility. You can enforce quotas on the maximum number of uncollected messages and bytes that can reside in a given queue. For more information on setting these quotas in the Configure Queues dialog, see the Defining Queues in the Queue Configuration Section topic in Chapter 2.
To enable quota enforcement, use the Quotas and Enable items from the Manage menu. You can disable quota enforcement by using the Disable item. If you are not concerned whether your application exceeds quotas, you should disable quotas to increase performance and reduce screen clutter.
To view link and queue statistics of MessageQ message queuing groups, use the Link Information and Queue Information items of the View menu to display the following dialogs:
Use the Link Information and Traffic Counts menu items to view the connection state and the cumulative messages and bytes for links between groups. Understand that the group for the node from which you are using the Monitor utility will not appear in this dialog; only the groups to which that group is currently connected or could be connected to will appear.
Table 4-1 describes the fields of the Link Traffic Counts dialog. Viewing Link Traffic Counts
Use the Disconnected In/Out statistic to see if any link between groups is constantly going up and down (cycling). A cycling link could indicate a network timeout problem.
This dialog can be useful for diagnosing bad message puts. For example, if you sent a cross-group message and it does not show up, yet the Viewing Link Traffic Counts dialog shows that all the links are up, your application may be in error.
Use the Link Information and Traffic Rates menu items to view the connection state and the average byte and message counts per second for the links of all groups. Average bytes and message counts per second is referred to as "throughput rates". Table 4-2 describes the fields of the Link Traffic Rates dialog.
The Viewing Link Traffic Rates dialog is useful for checking the put/get rate of messages:
Use the Link Information and Traffic Detail menu items to view the connection state and the average byte and message counts of a single link.
Table 4-3 describes the fields of the Link Traffic Detail dialog. Viewing Link Traffic Detail
Use the Link Information and Traffic Detail dialog if you suspect that a traffic problem is occurring between two particular groups. If you want to narrow down the problem further and suspect that the problem is due to one queue only, use the Queue Traffic Detail dialog.
Use the Link Information and Detail menu items to view the link attributes of a selected group.
Table 4-4 describes the fields of the Link Detail dialog.
Use the Queue Information and Traffic Counts menu items to view the cumulative counts of the messages sent and received for all queues of the group. Note that statistics must be turned on for this screen to be useful.
Table 4-5 describes the fields of the Queue Traffic Counts dialog.
Use the Queue Information and Traffic Rates menu items to view the traffic rates of all queues of a particular group. Traffic rates are defined as the throughput of messages, either sent or received, per second. The Queue Traffic Rates dialog allows you to verify that suspected problems with message throughput exist.
Note that you must reset statistics each time you monitor traffic rates. Failing to do so will result in an inaccurate throughput assessment.
Table 4-6 describes the fields of the Queue Traffic Rates dialog.
If you expect to see activity in the messages sent and received per second fields, but see 0.00 instead, try resetting the statistics. If an attached queue is inactive for a significant amount of time, the messages sent/received per second values approach zero because the value is derived as an average since statistics were last reset. Unless statistics are reset, these fields will not give an accurate assessment of recent queue activity.
Use the Queue Information and Traffic Detail menu items to view the message and byte traffic rates of a single queue. Table 4-7 describes the fields of the Queue Traffic Detail dialog.
Use the Queue Information and Detail screen to view the attributes of a selected queue. If quotas have been enabled, they can be viewed from this dialog. Queue Information and Detail shows the last time a queue was attached and detached, which can be useful for determining whether or not your application is truly interacting with a queue.
Table 4-8 describes the fields of the Queue Detail dialog.