MQSeries.net :: View topic

fswarbrick · Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2020 3:26 pm Post subject:

First, a couple of notes:

My point in describing our environment is to make it known that we really don't use MQ that much at this point. Because of this we don't really have anyone who is truly responsible for the design of the MQ environment. The first setup was, I believe, architected by someone who is no longer with the company; and those who are (nominaly) in charge of the application don't seem to have a great understanding of the existing architecture. Perhaps I am being too hard on them, but that is my impression.

The second one I was pretty heavily involved in the design, as I am the application developer/architect responsible for the CICS side of the house for this application. Even then I was learning as I went along, as was the admin in charge of installing and configuring the (Java) vendor application.

From the "MQ admin" side of the house, the same z/OS System Progammer was responsible for setting up all of the queues and the like for both projects. But he didn't have (I believe) any MQ experience before we bought MQ, so he was also learning on the job. And now our mainframe is "in the cloud" (zCloud) so all of our sysprogs were assigned new (non-mainframe!) roles and the cloud vendor "manages" MQ. Yet even there, we are supposed to tell them what we need and they simply implement it. They're not involved in any of the design.

The environment is stable now, and working well, but we have a third application coming up and its all kind of defaulted to me to design the MQ portion, even though I am not an MQ admin nor am I actually working on the application that will use MQ. But no one else has stepped up, so here I am. I somehow managed to get myself MQ admin rights in our test/dev environment, so at least I can test out my "theories" of how things should work rather than just making guesses after reading some manuals. So with that, and after having set up MQ on my home laptop, I've become fairly comfortable with this support. But in the end it truly "isn't my job".

So I am wondering in other shops, what are the roles of the various groups that have to interact with MQ? Does the MQ admin take the lead and get requirements from the application groups? Or does MQ admin simply implement what some other role (who?) asks them to implement?

I keep nudging management to hire a dedicated MQ resource, but with the fact that the cloud provider insists (from my understanding) on actually being the MQ admin, there really wouldn't be much work outside of projects for this dedicated MQ resource to work on.

Anyone have any thoughts on how a shop such as ours might best "manage MQ"?

Thanks!