How to activity trace the MO71 application

MO71 utilises the MQCNO_ACTIVITY_TRACE_DISABLED option so that while using it to view activity trace records, you are not also generating even more! This is of course, only honoured if the queue manager allows it which is controlled by the queue manager attribute ACTVCONO. So in addition, the MO71 Activity trace viewer also has some quick check boxes to hide from view all its records should they be generated.

What if you want to see the activity trace for MO71 though? For example if you want to trace the API Exerciser?

There are two ways to over-ride the use of MQCNO_ACTIVITY_TRACE_DISABLED. One is to use the following command (which applies the over-ride to all applications that have specified it).

ALTER QMGR ACTVCONO(DISABLED)

The other is to add a stanza like the following to your queue manager’s mqat.ini file. Remember if MO71 is already connected, you can make an alteration to the queue manager object to get it to pick up the new mqat.ini file or just disconnect and reconnect to the queue manager to pick it up.

# Turn on tracing for MO71
ApplicationTrace:
  ApplName=mqmonntp.exe
  Trace=ON

Now looking at the Activity Trace window, on the “Settings” tab, uncheck “Exclude this process” so you can see records from this process ID, and also “Exclude MO71 processes” which just causes the filtering for the “Output” tab to hide any records that come from any “mqmonntp.exe”. Remember to press Apply Settings once you’ve made these and any other filtering changes.

Activity Trace Settings Page – Check boxes to exclude MO71 trace records

Note: With these two check boxes, you could run one instance of MO71 to view the Activity Trace records, and a second instance of MO71 doing the activity you want to trace, for example using the API Exerciser, then you could leave “Exclude this process” checked and only uncheck “Exclude MO71 processes”.

It may also be wise to turn off any automatic operations that are being done by MO71, such as exporting objects on a scheduled time interval, which would generate a lot of activity from MO71 in the trace.

Then you’ll be able to see any API calls made by the MO71 application, for example:-

13:38:35   8220( 21) [   85us] C:\MQGem\mqmonntp.exe MQOPEN INPUT.Q 
MQOPEN(
   Connection Id:414D51434D514731202020202020202027E1F55920005205
   Hobj         :8 QUEUE(MQG1/INPUT.Q)
   Open Options :00000010
                 00000010 MQOO_OUTPUT                    (Output)
   Dynamic Queue:AMQ.*
   CompCode     :0    
   Reason       :0     OK.
  )

---

Other resources that you may find useful about Activity Tracing.

• MQTC v2.0.1.7 presentation by Morag Hughson: Using Application Activity Trace
• Blog Post about the MO71 Activity Trace Viewer
• developerWorks article by Emma Bushby: Increasing the visibility of messages using WebSphere MQ Application Activity Trace
• MQTC v2.0.1.5 presentation by Tim Zielke: MQ Problem Determination with Tracing
• Knowledge Center: Application Activity Trace (IBM MQ)
• Knowledge Center: Application Activity Trace (MQ Appliance)

Advertisements