How to monitor your IBM Integration Bus
By: Mohamed Elnemr
Tags: Root Cause Analysis, IBM, Ibm Integration Bus, Monitoring, Stackstate

As a software implementation consultant working with IBM Integration Bus (IIB), I get the following question a lot:

“Our message flows are up, but we still see performance degradation with our application. How do we know which component is causing this degradation?”

In other words, a lot of people are trying to achieve end-to-end visibility on their complete application network infrastructure through the IBM Integration Bus but are failing to do so. Does this sound familiar? Don’t worry! We have got you sorted. Read this blog post to learn everything you need to know.

What is the IBM Integration Bus?

The IIB is a software product that allows applications to consume, produce, and exchange messages regardless of their content. The IIB moves messages between the different applications in your IT infrastructure. However, so many things can go wrong during this process, affecting application performance or availability.

Better insights with IIB and StackState

With its topology and relationship-based observability capability, StackState can show you how different components of the IIB are related. In short, connecting your IIB with StackState allows you to:

· See vital performance metrics from IIB

· Get alerts before incidents happen

· Consume any type of data and combine multiple data sources with your IIB for better monitoring

· Monitor your IBM Message Queue (IBM MQ) and see how it affects your IIB.

Combined with application monitoring, this gives you end-to-end visibility, allowing you to reveal the blind spots associated with application performance issues.

IIB and StackState in action

The picture below shows you live data of an IIB instance’s topology. It has two brokers, seven applications, and a few messages in the flow. If a message flow is down, then you can see which applications are going to be affected. The same concept applies to any other component like your Queue Manager, coming from IBM MQ. All of them are hosted on a server that is monitored by a StackState agent.

If you zoom out, you get more insights about the host itself and how different processes can affect your IIB.

Once an incident occurs, you will be alerted immediately on its root cause and what is affected.

Finally, the integration can also be expanded to measure your IIB’s performance with StackState. This enables you to retrieve metrics from IIB related to the queues or message flows. These are metrics like message rate per second or the latency of a message flow. Do you want to learn more about the IBM Integration Bus and StackState? Schedule a demo right here.

About StackState

StackState delivers Relationship-Based Observability. StackState integrates with APM tools, infrastructure monitoring tools, virtualization and cloud platforms, Kubernetes, and incident management systems to add the certainty and richness of relationships, configuration changes, and AI-based diagnostics to the existing incident management process. This uniquely leads to Deterministic Root Cause, which helps IT teams prevent and solve problems more quickly and efficiently.