IBM MQ Reviews

I inherited it when I took over administration of a platform. It is pretty core in our business. I haven't really dealt with configuration that much. It is used to push transactions throughout z/OS, IBM i, Windows, and Linux. It seems to be pretty reliable. It's one of the few things we have that just runs, almost to a point where you forget to go back and do some upgrades. We're running a couple versions that are a little old, and you just forget that; like, "Oh yeah, it's running." It's pretty solid.

It gives us flexibility to drive a solution on any platform but have a reliable communication network.

I didn't know how to get into it. I had to Google how to get into it. Once I got into it, it made sense. It was a green-screen implementation, but it made sense.

I don't know enough about it to really say, "This is where it's missing something."

You can always say price is an area with room for improvement.

It's solid. It's one of the few things that just runs, and runs, and runs.

We've upgraded multiple systems and it's kind of come along. As far as the transaction basis that it's responsible for, it's done a really good job. There might be some lagging Windows versions; that's really been more about operating systems lagging behind because of other applications, not MQ. You might get some spots there, where performance might not be what we would've expected, but that's really not an MQ issue.

We have hardly ever used technical support for it. The last time we did, we found out that we were running an unsupported release. That kind of shows how long it just runs. Sometimes you forget to upgrade a couple of the components.

When I have used technical support, I thought it was very good. They even reached out and helped us a little bit in that situation – when we weren't even supported – to take a look at some of the basic stuff, just to make sure we didn't miss anything. Eventually, we got through the situation. We figured out what it was. It turned out it wasn't MQ at all. It was just a configuration change. I think tech support has been pretty good.

I'm an IBM i guy. I always think IBM support is excellent. I haven't dealt with z/OS in a long time, but they were good there, too. The product support, I would imagine, has been pretty good, too.

It's a worthwhile product. If it's priced accordingly and does everything for you, go for it. It's a good product.

I haven’t given it a perfect rating because I haven't had enough experience with it to say, "This is where it's lacking something." As I’ve mentioned, it seems to be really solid and just works.

The most important criteria for you when selecting a vendor is probably the durability of the vendor. You can get into these relationships that look good, with all good intentions from them, but they're not around. With IBM, obviously, we've invested heavily in the company for a long time. We have a good relationship with them. I think durability, and then going with that is innovation. Those are probably the two biggest characteristics.

I don't know that much about our mobile and cloud initiatives. I think we have some. They're probably beyond the infancy stage but certainly not mature at any point. I'm not sure how this technology is driving any of that. I'm not sure.

We use it for data integration.

It's very stable. 

It also has a backup queue concept and topics, features that I have not seen anywhere else. I like these features very much.

It could provide more monitoring tools and some improvement to the UI. I would also like to see more throughput in future versions.

I've been dealing with IBM MQ for the last six months.

It's scalable. It's not for every use case, but you can scale it.

We have about 50 users of IBM MQ.

The technical support is good.

The setup is between straightforward and complex. It's not as straightforward as Apache ActiveMQ.

We did the setup.

I like Kafka more. MQ is number-two compared to Kafka.

It's a good product but I think it's too costly. That's one disadvantage because there are already many open-source products, like RabbitMQ, Kafka, and ActiveMQ. If you really need a solid MQ solution then go with IBM MQ. If you don't need such a robust solution then you can go with any of the other solutions.

I would rate IBM MQ at seven out of 10. It has less throughput.

We use IBM MQ for message transmission between our customers, and their agents or global message service providers, such as SITA or ARINC, for tier one critical applications.

Applications are time critical, and IBM MQ has played a significant role in ensuring fast, reliable message transmissions. With IBM MQ in place, fear of messages getting lost in the case of an unplanned failure is almost none.

• Data integrity, reliability and security are very important to our business.
• No messages are lost, and recovery is good in case of any serious failures.
• No dependency on the end party service's run status.

No technical issues come to mind.

In terms of cost, IBM MQ is slightly on the higher side.

Its scalability and uptime is very high. So, these are the two main valuable features of this product. We rarely see any downtime on MQ's side of the product.

It helps us, i.e., even if some of the other apps are down, we don't lose any of the customer data, so it's very beneficial from that perspective.

We would like to see more clustering, high availability, and also monitoring features. Monitoring is a big part. We would like to see if we get back out queues or the queue depth goes high, so that we can be alerted on that.

It still needs some improvement, in terms of high availability and the clustering needs to be improved. Monitoring is a big piece which is missing.

We have been using this solution for the past ten years.

For the stability of this product, I would give it a 9/10 rating. Only sometimes when some queue manager dies, then at that point, we lose a couple of messages but not a whole lot.

I would give the technical support a 7/10 rating because we do get the response back, but a lot of time gets wasted in carrying out processes such as getting and sending logs, instead of coming online and sharing the screen and troubleshooting the issue.

We work with Proficient Solutions, Inc. and Prolifics. There are others as well, but these are the two major ones.

The number one criteria while selecting a vendor is availability. The other factors that we look for are proximity, their technical knowledge, market reputation and of course the pricing policy.

It's a good product. Compared to the other products on the market, it's a very good product. Based on your company needs, you should give it a try and it should work.

The scalability of the environment is the most valuable feature. We also like the speed and the manageability of this tool.

It keeps all of our large systems interconnected, so the MQ is at the base of all of our system integration.

I would like better control over the depth of messages that go in there from all the learning and notifications, better management tools around queue depth, queue issue, that kind of stuff. If things are backing up in the queue, getting better at learning from a dashboard of how the whole ecosystem of MQ is running, that'd be really nice. Because we're using a third party to get that now.

Stability is very strong. We haven't had any issues.

We really like the multi-channel queue manager that allows us to have different entries into the queue and manage that traffic; kind of splitting it out. That gives us an immense amount of scale as we add new applications.

We have used support. They are okay. Opening a PMR is a pain in the neck. When you're in a critical event, you don't want to go open up a web ticket. You want to get somebody on the phone, it could fix the problem now. We get that it all goes with the support level and we are pretty high.

We had a mainframe that had MQ associated to it, so we just kept it going forward.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Study hard, and implement small, and then scale.

Responsiveness, the tool, and price are what I look for in a vendor.

The product encourages the idea of asynchronous processing, which means that the sender and receiver are not required to be active and running at the same time. The message will be saved to the receiver queue until the system starts successfully and pulls it for processing. This is typically used in all internet banking functions that receive their data from different bank systems.

• Support for JMS 2.0, because we develop solutions compatible with Java EE7.
• Seamless integration with IBM WebSphere Application Server, which is the most stable application server I ever worked with.
• Installed and configured at Windows, AIX and IBM i mostly the same way and set of commands.

They need to add the ability to send full messages (header + payload) from the MQ Explorer program, not just the payload.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

I would rate the technical support as good, 8/10.

I previously used ActiveMQ, but I switched to IBM MQ due to the robustness of the solution.

If you are familiar with IBM products, you will find initial setup straightforward.

IBM MQ has a flexible license model based on the Processor Value Unit (PVU) and I recommend it.

We evaluated Active MQ also.

I would advise the potential user to read about security considerations and compliance with security standards.

We are mainly using it for communication, for connecting to multiple systems. Applications are putting their messages on MQ and, from MQ, we are reading them using IBM Integration Bus. We then process them and send back the response.

The MQ protocol is widely used across multiple applications and it's so simple for connectivity. 

Other valuable features include the 

• messaging format
• message persistence
• security features, including several connection channels and name-based and user-based authentication.

I had some issues earlier, two, three years back. I don't exactly remember them now.

I have been working with IBM MQ for eight years. We are currently trying to implement IBM MQ on OpenShift and cp4i. We have MQ on-premises and we are trying to migrate it to OpenShift, a container platform.

Stability-wise, it's very good. People have been using it for 15 to 20 years. MQ and IIB are the most stable products from IBM.

We can scale up and down anytime. There are no issues there. We have 20 to 30 internal applications connecting to middleware and all of them are connecting using the MQ protocol.

We haven't had major issues, but whenever we have had an issue we have written to IBM and they have gotten back to us on a timely basis.

The setup is straightforward. There is not much to create, it's a one-time setup, including configuring the high-availability. That is the main thing. The parameters create the queues. It takes about 10 to 15 seconds for each queue.

In addition, we had IIB, the IBM Integration Bus deployment, including message flows and DB scripts, etc. So the deployment was not only MQ. In deploying IIB flows, we had some queue creation, server connections, and channel creation. Overall, it was about 80 percent IIB deployment and 20 percent MQ deployment.

We had two people involved: one guy from the support team and one guy from admin. For maintenance, in the sense of the application support, we have four team members but we are handling multiple applications, not only MQ.

We deployed it ourselves.

Although I'm not involved with costs in our company, IBM products, in general, have high licensing costs and support costs are too high. A lot of people have started using open-source, like Kubernetes and microservices. There is also Apache ActiveMQ. There are many other products out there.

I would tell people to use this, except that the pricing and support costs are too high.

I would rate MQ at eight out of 10. 

We have a diverse distributed environment that includes Z/OS, Microsoft Windows, Solaris, Linux, and zLinux. We use multiple programming languages and different databases.

IBM MQ was found to be easy to implement and operate. It became the defacto standard, and integration problems moved from an operational issue to application solutions.

The most valuable features are the point to point messaging and the MQ API. This solution is simple and very diverse.

I would like to see faster monitoring tools for this solution.