IBM MQ Reviews

For us, it's basically just our messaging bus. We pretty much use it just for events that are limited to various applications that we have in our company. That is pretty much the use case that we have with respect to the IBM MQ.

Also, the stability and reliability of the tool system is what makes it really easy to be able to work with.

Technically, it has made our lives a lot easier. Prior to having MQ, we were basically developing these custom in-house solutions, where we were running into a lot of issues. After bringing MQ on board, along with its integration and flexibility that it has provided us with, it has basically shortened the amount of work we had to do in order to get it set up and to get the communications happening in between.

Maybe it should have something with respect to being able to provide a graphical view of the data elements that we are processing. For example, how many messages are being processed by a certain queue or for how much time each message is staying in the queue, and so forth. If there's a way that IBM can provide this tool that can have this out-of-the-box dashboard feature, it would be helpful.

Right now, we are trying to build custom solutions so as to gather that information. We are using Dynatrace, which is one of our monitoring solutions. We try to use it to analyze how many messages this queue has processed today and then we are trying to calculate the data for how long did the message stay in the system before the application picked it up. If there is a tool that can actually provide an out-of-the-box solution of this kind, then it would be really efficient for us.

We have not experienced any stability issues. We have been running this for almost about five years now. I don't think, up to this day, we've had any server down issues primarily because of MQ, i.e., the product itself. It's very stable.

With respect to scalability, we're not such a big shop where we are continuously scaling up, but it's a pretty standard system for us. We did not really have to do a whole lot. It runs on very bare resources; it's pretty good.

We have had a few scenarios where we were trying to develop some custom security solutions that required MQ to be authenticated, when they are trying to push our consumer messages out. It was not really an issue but more of an enhancement that we were trying to do. That's when we tried to approach IBM and get their inputs on the best way to do this.

They certainly were very helpful. They provided us with the necessary guidance and showed us some technical documents that were available for our reference and basically, to get the project completed.

Actually, when I joined this company, they already had the solution.

First, assess your requirement. Basically, understand what you want to do and that's where it all starts. Doing the right analysis, finding the right solution; that's where success and failure happens.

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.

We have an M2000. The M2001 has a 3 TB SSD, which is a good feature. I wish they had had it when I started. But as we upgrade, in the future, we'll probably move to that. Everything is working properly with the current version.

The reason the migrations are an issue is, we came from Version 7.01 and Version 7.5. The security in Version 8 was a little tighter. So, there were a few things we had to learn. Be sure that we were up to speed, so that's all.

We haven’t had any stability problems at all. Stability has been outstanding. We went from multi-instance queue managers, which worked fine, except they worked often. That wasn't good for us. So it was a perceived outage for our clients. The availability has been outstanding with the MQ appliance.

I have used support on several occasions. We were an early adopter, and there are always a few bugs along the way. We did use technical support and we went all the way up to the lab a couple of times. It was outstanding as usual.

We have been an MQ adopter since 1998. We were using z/OS, so we have been using MQ along the way. Then we went to Windows, to Unix, to Linux, and now the appliance.

Actually, setup was straightforward. I'm not a hardware person and it was a first-time setup. It was what they said it was. It wasn't a 30-minute setup, but it was pretty easy.

Plan your file systems. Plan your messaging names and your network routes. You want to be ready with everything before you start and once you do that, you're in good shape.

When choosing a vendor, I want knowledge and availability. Those are the two things that are most important.

There are a lot of valuable features, such as high availability, and workload balancing. Those are the main two.

It allows different applications to communicate with each other.

I'd definitely like to see a more-stable high availability feature.

There is a feature that is in beta right now which synchronously writes messages to another server. That's something that we'd like to see, just for the stability.

It's been there for a while. We've had it for over 15 years.

Lately, it hasn't been that stable. We're using multi-instance queue managers and we're having a lot of issues with storage and that affects the availability of the queue manager.

Scalability is pretty good.

Support has been good so far. We submit a lot of PMRs and we usually get pretty good response.

I didn't make the decision to invest in this product. There was someone before me that decided.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Definitely read the manual before you do anything.

It allows us to do point-to-point integration in an easy manner. It allows different applications to talk to each other; applications that may speak different languages. You have mainframe technologies, Java-based apps, .NET, things of that nature, and MQ allows you the ability to share the data between those different types of systems.

The thing that I like about MQ most is its reliability. It's one of those types of products that just works. You don't have to tinker around with it too much. One of the biggest things that I really look for in a product is from a reliability perspective. Can I count on this to be up 24 hours a day, and do I have to keep hacking around with it? MQ is definitely something that is really reliable, so it's something that I really appreciate it.

I would just like a more user-friendly experience to do common administration tasks. I know that you can use MQ Explorer, but having something that's already built in would definitely be useful.

We haven't necessarily experienced any issues from a migration perspective. Typically, where we see the majority of our issues at is when we're doing upgrades to the Message Broker, or IBM Integration Bus is what it's called now. Those two products are typically married together. Most of our issues ... I wouldn't even call them issues. We see some issues when we migrate from different versions in regards to like, IIB. I think that's just because this is a more complex product. You have customized code in there. From an MQ perspective, everything's pretty straightforward.

I haven't had any stability issues. I think the biggest thing, when there are issues, is having an easy way to figure out what's going on. I think one of the things that I'm looking forward to, from a MQ perspective, is just having more of a user-friendly experience. MQ has traditionally been somewhat of a command-style solution, so anything that they could do to improve that would definitely be helpful.

We have not had any scalability issues.

We have teams that usually interact with IBM. My team doesn't necessarily do that that often but when we do, it's a fairly pleasant experience.

From an MQ perspective, it's something that we've been using for a long time. Unfortunately, when you're dealing with very large companies, it's difficult to transition away from stuff that you built a long time ago, so you have a lot of this stuff that's just hanging around, that's been built a long time ago, and you still have to maintain it. Once something goes into production, it's typically very difficult to get money to update that service five, ten years down the road.

Setup was pretty straightforward. MQ has been around for a long time. It's a reliable product. It doesn't change that much, so I think everybody, at least in my organization, is fairly comfortable with installing and implementing MQ.

MQ was, to me, pretty much the gold standard in regards to what it does. To me there's really no point to look at other vendors.

Have a common understanding of why you feel that you need MQ. MQ was something that we implemented years ago, so there may be new technologies out there that you may be able to utilize to make the project you're trying to do easier, and make your implementation a little easier.

The asynchronous messaging and the assured delivery are the most valuable features because your data needs to make it through from one app to the other, and you don't want to lose it.

It's multi-platform, so we can go between mainframe, Unix, Windows, different platforms, and we can have applications send data using the messaging.

I really can't think of anything that needs improvement. For our company, it does what we need it to do.

The price is always an issue. Like anything you buy, you want the best deal. We are retailers, so we are always looking at costs. I am sure every company does. It would be nice if the message security and file transfer weren’t an extra cost. But I suppose if you want a deluxe of anything, you will need to pay.

We've had it for 20 years.

It's very stable.

It's very scalable.

We don't have to use support very often, but they are responsive.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Implement it. It's pretty easy and straightforward.

I don't do the vendor selection, but I get involved a little bit. When selecting a vendor, I would want ease of administration and installation.

• Ease of use
• Access to support resources
• Access to new release information in a timely manner
• Easy to digest

It is easy to use and seamless with our existing technology. It's a trusted name we know that we've used for years. It performs and it has very low downtime, if any.

With MQ, we always have trouble with the initial priming call failing. It would be nice if we didn't have the little wake-up service. Maybe if it self-monitored, had it's own health monitor, to fire those off upon startup, so we don't have to pay the price for it.

We are happy with the stability.

We have not had any scalability issues to my knowledge.

Our admins have used support in the past. As far as I know, they are satisfied with it. It's pretty solid and it's kind of the backbone of a lot of our stuff.

The initial install was a long time ago.

Stick with the out-of-the-box requirements, unless something tells you to go in another direction. And if so, definitely work with the vendor to make sure that they give you the adequate tools to do that, or help you scope that out.

When selecting a vendor, support is the most important criteria.

It's rock solid. It just works. We have to have guaranteed delivery and support. Support is solid as well, knowing that IBM is there. We looked at some open-source products and other competitors, and at the time that we made the decision, IBM was the one that had the largest support structure. Rock-solid performance really is the most solid feature of it.

We had to integrate different systems and MQ allowed us to send messages between systems and guarantee delivery. What that did is allow us to more easily integrate those systems and feel 100% trust in this solution.

From an MQ perspective, if they had some built-in monitoring, built-in dashboards, maybe some web-enabled functions so we don't have to load specific tools on our workstations. The training and scalability clustering could be a little bit easier. They could also make it failover- and fault-tolerant. The training aspect is a big part. I think IBM maybe has some work to do on the training side a little bit.

Stability is great. Stability is rock solid. We have very few issues with it.

Scalability: We're a smaller shop so we don't have the resources necessarily to take care of it. Scaling out MQ is possible, but it's not as easy as some other products. It's not as easy as other technologies even.

We were not previously using a different solution. The business challenged the pattern we used. Using queuing and messaging presented itself as the best solution.

When choosing a vendor, we want support, access to information, solid products, and, hopefully, building blocks where we can build on and use other products and foundation.

Setup was more complex than what I thought it might be. We have an active-active cluster, meaning that the systems will fail over to each other if they need to. It was more complicated to set up. We had difficulties setting that up initially, even with consultant help.

I would go back to the rock solid performance. If you can get through the setup and the learning curve with the product, it will just run and work for you. That would be the advice I would give.

It provides scalability and it also provides secure messaging.

It is very robust and very scalable.

At a recent conference, I went to a presentation that had the latest version and it has amazing stuff that's coming out. So, I am excited to use those, specifically surrounding the web console and the fact that it's API integrated.

We have stability in our environment because of the product. We can keep adding solutions to the mixture and it still performs as is, which is again a more stable process.

It provides scalability.

I usually deal with level three support and they're pretty awesome; so, they're very good. I rate them 5/5.

There was not a previous solution. I know because of experience with my other jobs that this is a more robust technology to invest in.

Setup was straightforward. I had experience from my previous work, so I was able to bring that experience and implement it here. I was fully versed with it, so it was easier for me.

It's super expensive, so ask them if they can consolidate some other licensing costs. But, IBM is IBM, so I guess we'll pay for it.

IBM was on the top of our short list. I didn't even look at the others, because I am biased.

I would do a PoC with IBM and there's a lot of technical help out there and people who would come to help you. So, use them and also look for other customers who have used the product. Then, you will be able to see the benefits of it and try to fit it in to your department.

It can do messaging throughout multiple platforms. That's the major benefit for MQ. At the same time, we use it quite extensively to do messages between the iSeries and the mainframe.

The amount of transactions: You don't have to send a file down. You just send the messages; whatever the transaction is. It's going to be much more effective and more trackable.

It's pretty good right now the way it is.

I don't know whether it is available with the new features, but in the older versions, I remember, to test a queue, you actually had to call an API to send messages back and forth. If that would be a one-command scenario like on the iSeries, instead of me calling the API, sending a message and receiving it, I would like to have something like that. I don't know if MQ’s new features support something like this.

Stability’s pretty good. I haven't had any issues. Although, in clustering, you have to know exactly what you're doing. Otherwise, your cluster will be out of whack a little bit. Otherwise, it's stable. It's very stable.

You can scale it anywhere.

I have not really used technical support in the last year.

When I did, I've had experiences with channels not starting up, either due to connectivity issues which turned out to be either network-related. The messages are really clearly defined and errors are logged, so we referenced that and based on that, we took action.

When we do contact technical support, they're excellent; 5/5.

Because I had worked with it before, initial setup wasn't that bad. If I look at myself at the beginning, when we wanted to set it up, I actually went and took a course before setting it up. Especially on the iSeries side and all the communications, you have to get familiar with all the terms and terminology that are being used on the application. Once you know that, then setting it up is not a big deal.

It's very easy to set up, it's very stable and it's trackable. MQ is a really good tool to be able to send messages back and forth between multiple platforms. If they're looking for a solution for sending files across, they can actually use MQ to send the messages across.

I haven’t given it a perfect rating because there's always room for improvement.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with is being strong and supporting it, and being there for a number of years, so I don't have to worry about an unsupported product.

We use it mainly on iSeries and mainframe, so I’m not really involved in using MQ to connect across cloud, mobile, and devices as part of the intranet of things.

Stability and reliability are the most valuable features. It's very reliable and very stable. You can do a fast recovery in case of any failure. It's a very consistent and stable system.

The whole integration channel between PowerVM and third-party applications goes through MQ. This is why MQ plays the role of middleware, of integration, and it helps us to quickly integrate all applications around PowerVM.

One possible area with room for improvement is some integration with the alert system to alert us in case of any failure of any message to be transmitted from one source to another; maybe that could help. It doesn't do that right now.

We will see how MQ will help us when we go to cloud, one day.

It’s very stable.

We have never faced any problem with upgrading or scalability between MQ series and the IBM the PowerVM. It's good.

Once you install MQ, you don't need a lot of support. Of course, we have support with an IBM partner in our country, but up until now, we have never faced a major issue that could impact our business.

Implementation was very straightforward.

Our environment is 60% IBM. We did not shop to search for another solution.

In general, though, the most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are support, response time, credibility, to be near to us, and that they are not working from the cloud.

In a financial institution, for very critical applications, when you invest, you have to invest one time. You don't have time to redo the work over and over. When you build your setup, your infrastructure, to do your service and your financial service for mission-critical applications, you have to choose the best-of-breed application that supports you. This is why we choose IBM without any hesitation.

We have never faced any problem. It works fine.

We are a bank, and regulations restrict us from using the cloud, at this point. We're using MQ only on our data center.