IBM MQ Reviews

We are currently working on the use case. I work as an IBM system admin and part of MQ is hosted on the IBM server. We have a lot of other servers and appliances for IBM MQ that costs us a lot of money so we are currently looking for less expensive alternatives. Kafka is one of the choices on the table. We are looking to migrate to services on Google which is why Kafka was proposed for us to implement. 

We use it to integrate the backend and front end solutions and applications. 

The most valuable feature is the stability. It's perfect in this way. 

We are looking for another solution that is less expensive.

There is room for improvement. The live and portal monitoring needs improvement. 

I have been using IBM MQ for four years. 

It's very stable. 

It's scalable. 

I would rate their technical support an eight out of ten.

The initial setup was average. Not so complex and not so straightforward. 

The deployment itself, not including testing, took a couple of hours. 

It's expandable but it will add costs that should be taken into consideration. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

In the next release, I would like for there to be easier monitoring. The UI should be easier for non-technical users to set up appliances and servers. 

We have a core banking application. If any system or application wants to talk to the core banking application, the request and the response will go through the MQ servers. The requests and responses are in the form of XML.

We have a VMware environment with Windows and Linux. 

We have clients spread all over Africa and they have to process different types of requests, such as credit requests and debit requests. We use the Queue Manager to handle these requests. Our MQ server will accept the request and send it on to our core banking application.

If you imagine the order from left to right, the application is on the left, then the enqueue server is in the middle, and the core banking is on the right. In between the queue server and the banking application, we have APIs and systems in place to understand the XML files.

The most valuable feature is the Queue Manager, which lies in the middle between our application and our core banking server.

Managing this solution is not difficult.

IBM MQ is very stable, which is important for our core banking application.

The memory management is very poor and it consumes too much memory. We have 24 gigabytes of RAM and almost every day, we had to free up processes so that it can run.

Some of our messages were not being transmitted so we had to manually look at the MQ server to cut and paste them. That is supposed to be fully automated. The problem is normally a routing issue but it is compounded if there are connectivity troubles. For example, if 3,000 messages are supposed to be sent but 1,000 were not then you have to do it manually.

The solution is not very lightweight and if it could be decentralized, then put into three or four containers, it may be an improvement in this regard.

I have been using IBM MQ since 2015.

The MQ service has never gone down and has never failed us. It is only offline when the VM is offline.

This is a scalable solution. We scale by adding another VM to our cluster.

We have eight engineers who are using MQ, but in terms of end-users, or people who are consuming the services, there are thousands or millions. It is an enterprise-level organization and each application has a user base, so the scale depends on the application.

I have never had support for this solution.

As far as I understand, we did not use another solution prior to IBM MQ. Our old strategy did not use this type of technology.

The initial setup is very straightforward. I have done it both on Linux and on Windows. With Windows, it is just a case of hitting the "next" button. I would say that within ten minutes, you should be finished with the installation.

Prior to the installation, you have to make sure that you have Java installed.

I deployed this solution for the company.

The number of people required for maintenance depends on the environment. We used to have one person manage each application that was connected to the MQ server, which meant that we had four people maintaining it.

It is difficult to assess the ROI for this type of solution.

IBM MQ is expensive and they charge based on the CPU.

I am familiar with a couple of similar solutions, including Red Hat AMQ. In fact, I am trying to migrate to Red Hat. It is very easy to install and get it running. All you have to do is get your API and you're done. Stability-wise, however, with Red Hat AMQ, I have seen cases where some of the messages were lost. IBM MQ is definitely more stable.

For the most part, this solution serves our purpose. It is not difficult to manage and the only challenges we have really had were to deal with some of the messages manually.

My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is to consider costs first. It is expensive and you have to ask what value you are going to get from it. You need to consider factors like how many messages you are sending per day. If your budget is sufficient then IBM MQ is your choice, otherwise, you should look into a cheaper option. Also, if stability is the most important thing to you then IBM MQ is the choice that you want to make.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

In our company, it's the main hub for our whole CRM solution. MQ manages things through the Broker.

I like the whole idea. But the first things are its simplicity and its robustness. Compared to any other product, it's the most robust I've worked with. And it's extremely easy to manage.

The worst part is the monitoring or admin, especially in the ACE or Broker. There is always a problem of transparency. In MQ you can observe any process and you know exactly what's going on behind the scenes, but with the ACE or Broker, it's a problem monitoring the HTTP inputs. It's like a black box.

The reason that I'm emphasizing monitoring is that I used to work for the company that produced the administration and monitoring tools for IBM. There was a lot of competition and a lot of confusion in the market. When I moved to this company I actually used my previous experience and wrote my own tools. I am not much of a C# programmer, so I was struggling a bit. I know the concepts, but I was missing some straightforward support from IBM. They were selling it as a part of Tivoli, but you needed to implement the whole Tivoli infrastructure. If you had some other monitoring provider it was a bit of a pain. That is my concern here.

I've been certified as an MQ specialist since 1997 so I have about 23 years' experience in this field. I've been using it since version 2.0. Currently, I'm in production support and supporting version 9, mainly.

It's stable. I'm working for a FT 500 company, a global company employing about 60,000 people, and we've been using this product ever since I joined the company in 2003. We haven't had a single major performance issue or crash.

It's scalable. We have gradually increased our usage over time.

I am satisfied with the support from IBM. To be honest, I used to be an IBM trainer for this product, so I know people there. The only issue I have is that if the product goes out of service, it's difficult to get PMR (Problem Management Report) for it. In production, a lot of businesses tend to stick with the older versions.

I've been doing it for over 20 years, so it's straightforward to me. Beginners might struggle with the initial settings, like user rights and the basic stuff, but setting up MQ is fine.

Before joining this company I was mainly consulting for various companies in Germany, and I noticed the core problem was always that in projects where MQ was implemented, they were targeting too low on the management food chain. You need that to go as high as possible because it changes the whole paradigm, your ways of thinking. A lot of the implementations were bad because they were partially patching some problems at the bottom level. The whole strategy was never oriented to messaging. My suggestion would be to be aware of that. Go global from the start. Don't address things partially.

There is a team of four people who supervise all MQ activities here.

I would rate IBM MQ at 10 out of 10, but ACE or Broker are between eight and nine, because of the lack of transparency.

We are a bank whose core banking system is not so advanced. It is still running on an AS/400 system. Credit Card system is are deployed on IBM mainframes. About 70 to 80 percent of the bank's core systems rely on IBM AS/400 and mainframes. The enterprise service bus is used in conjunction with MQ to break synchronous web service /TCP calls into asynchronous MQ calls and expose them a web services-based or API-based service for both internal and external customers. 

As part of enterprise architecture principles, we have enforced all connectivity to be service/ interface based by using ESB, MFT or API. Minimize the point to point connectivity.

We are using dedicated IBM power/pure-app servers to run IBM Integration Bus, IBM MQ, and WebSphere Application Server. These are the three components being used for the bank's enterprise service bus.

People have started using the likes of Kafka, Spark and other new messaging technologies. But when you take the likes of banks into consideration, which mostly are running on mainframes and AS/400, implementing advanced technologies are not an easy job. Getting an MQ-certified guy is not that difficult in the ASEAN market. There are a lot of certified professionals. That's one of the reasons we still use MQ for most of our messaging. We are still looking at open-source deployments but we have not yet implemented anything like that because of the knowledge GAP & dependency on the existing products. We do not have a dedicated team to take on that task yet.

With IBM MQ still in the bank, and a dedicated team which has expertise in it, we really cut down the time-to-market, from a few months to a few weeks. The development framework is already there. If business comes up with requirements, technology team already know what needs to be done. And by building the in-house team, it gives us the facility where we don't need to ask the IBM guys or other vendors in the market to help us every time we have a new requirement.

Another way MQ has improved the way our organization functions is customer notification. Whenever payments are happening, such as incoming payments to the bank, we need to notify the customer. With MQ we can actually do that asynchronously. There are requirements for notifying customers on a real-time base & also for each and every payment sometimes, once a day. These are be enabled with the help of MQ.

In addition, there are fewer failures during the end-to-end payment process. MQ comes in very handy because we don't lose messages in transit (message persistence). It gives us the ability to store and forward messages when required. We heavily rely on MQ for these kinds of requirements.

Also, we have certain applications that want to receive the messages in both production and the disaster-recovery data center at the same time. Without MQ in the picture, it would have been very difficult for us to configure that. MQ Publish subscribe capability is very helpful in that scenario.

MQ has helped to reduce integration costs, mostly by acquiring the enterprise license of MQ. We can actually set up multiple MQ servers in the same environment and each MQ server is dedicated to a particular application. We also use MQ up to a level where the messages are coming from multiple host systems and they go back to a single channel. When written back, the response goes to the exact host that had sent the request (Message Affinity). Without a tool and without a messaging architecture that is as good as MQ's, it would take a lot of time in hard-coding to achieve that. Prior to the team being set up and having these frameworks in place, it took roughly two to three months to deliver any of these integrations. Now it takes three to four weeks. It has helped reduce the effort and man-hours by half.

We have been using the normal messaging along with channel authorization. 

At certain times — although not in this bank, in my previous experience — we had used the message authorization on top of the queue. That meant that the moment a user tried to write a message it would be authorized before it was written. 

In the ESB architecture, MQ is used to decouple synchronous consumer specific web services calls from the host system calls, by implementing state management. Request and response message matching rely on MQ Message ID & Correlation ID (MQMD header properties).

Message load balancing being implemented using MQ or achieving high throughput, while Message affinity ensures response messages are propagated to the very same host system which had generated the request message.

MQ publish subscribe feature being used to for notification where multiple instance of one or more applications can subscribe to the same topic at different time. 

Message expiry features ensures the redundant or unwanted messages are expired automatically from the MQ based on the settings. This feature is being used at times to ensure no duplication of payments.

Message persistence feature ensures the message availability even after any planned/unplanned downtime.

MQMFT feature ensures files are delivered asynchronously and complete file transfers are automated.

MQ authorization can help to ensure high level of security in accessing the messages from a MQ server or sending messages via MQ channels between two or more systems. 

Day-to-day, I don't really see anything much that we are lacking, but I have never really compared MQ with other products to see what it lacks.

I am well aware of the way that IBM sells the suite of products. But I would like to see it integrate with the newer ways of messaging, such as Kafka. They might say that you have IBM Integration Bus to do that stuff, but it would be great if MQ could, out-of-the-box, listen to public Kafka.

One of the other improvements that I would like to see from MQ is for it to be containerized. It may already have that functionality.

I have worked with IBM MQ for more than 10 years. I started using it in 2006. Recently, in the last three to four years, I have not had any work in the development area. I have moved on to enterprise architecture, so I don't really get a chance to use the solution every day. I haven't used it in the last three years.

I do read up on the new features when I get a chance to read, but I don't exactly have hands-on now-a-days. I now guide the team when they have issues, on things like how to set it up, how to have particular architectures on MQ. I still consult on it and I'm still familiar with it.

It is stable.

We have only had issues with the IBM GPFS File System, but that is a different product. We had an issue when we wanted to have an Active-Active deployment architecture across our production and disaster recovery site. We wanted the same MQ server to fail over to the disaster recovery site and come up from the state in which it went down on the production site. To achieve that we need a synchronous file system that is able to replicate the same data on the other side.

We haven't had any scalability issues with MQ. We are running on a scalable hardware platform with a goal of virtualizing deployment up to multiple cores, and it can add on more and more compute and RAM when required.

For at least the next five years we are sticking with the existing implementation, while we are looking to implement new features, such as containerization.

Our in-house support members are all certified. Most of them have 5 to 10 years of hands-on experience. They don't fall back on IBM for day-to-day support/issues. But if there is a Severity-1, they do log a problem ticket for further expert advises from IBM.

We have only had one issue that I can recall from the last four or five years, to do with the file synchronization. To figure it out, it took a few days.

Overall, the support has been good. As IBM doesn't have a lot of resources in Malaysia, they rely on India or Singapore region for support sometimes.

I am MQ version 6, & 7 -certified solutions architect & system administrator. So I find the setup to be very easy. I have been using MQ since very early of my career, and I was also with IBM for quite some time. So for me, it's very straightforward. The installers come with a nice, quick-setup guide, and most of the time, after the training, users can go set up their own MQ.

The amount of time it would take to bring it to production depends on the scope of the services. If I just have to install MQ, it is not more than an hour. But if I have to install MQ for specific servers, I would probably have to take account of the log size, its location, and what the volume is per day or per week, availability aspects, so it would take a bit longer.

Most of the time, when we implement MQ, we implement it along with other products. It depends on the use case. If you just want to query the server to get the information, I would recommend that to be asynchronous because inquiries are huge in volume. If the use case is payments, it could be defined as synchronous mode, and within the flow we could still break it into two or three parts.

From the design point of view, it is still pretty straightforward, depending on what licensing model you want to go for. If you want to use one MQ server with multiple clients it's doable, but if you have more critical systems running, then you should go for multiple MQ servers so that you have a dedicated server for each particular application. Those are the guiding principles that we use internally for projects to follow.

For deployment, we have written our own scripts. We are mostly relying on AIX/ Linux server. Our scripts are pretty much standard to do things like create/ change queue, channels and it's properties, shut down, restart the MQ services. All these are already scripted, so for our support team it takes them a few minutes to run through them, one after the other, and wait for scripts to be executed.

We have a fully dedicated team in-house to support MQ. There are teams that can help. TCS is one of them and IBM itself is one of them. And there are a few local vendors in the market that are quite proficient in it.

We have a support/ maintenance team of four pax and we are running 200 to 300 services on MQ. The solution doesn't exactly provide a user interface to the business user. The solution is more of a technology layer to support applications and we have 15 to 20 applications that are connected via ESB & MQ.

We have a multi-year OIO (open infrastructure offering) with IBM and if there is any additional licensing required it gets deducted from the OIO. We have been using IBM's other services as well.

We have been looking at some competitors; for example, TIBCO Messaging and MuleSoft from Salesforce. One difference I have seen is that TIBCO is already a containerized edition. I have yet to discuss with IBM MQ if it is available on container. Another thing TIBCO has is that its messaging framework comes with a package for Kafka support as well as plugins for MQ connectivity. It allows you to connect to MQ or to Kafka for messaging.

We are also going to look at the IBM API-led integration. We have been running IBM products for some years so we may want to compare & see how these gets compared with their counter-parts.

Overall, MQ is good, capability-wise. You still need a messaging platform and MQ is quite a reliable messaging platform. I have not seen hiccups using MQ across multiple environments in the bank. I have been using it since 2006 and I have never experienced any issues with the product itself. The guidelines of the product, the way it is used, the way things are done, are pretty self-explanatory. There are multiple blogs/ online helps available and there is a lot of help available from experts around the world.

Have a look at the features. If they complement the requirements you have, go ahead with it. If you are very technical and want to understand more about the open-source tools and features, that may require a notable learning curve.

The product has been around for a long time. It's probably time to see what MQ is going to add to its features. We have not started using IBM Cloud Pak with Red Hat OpenShift yet. We are also looking at using containerization but probably it may take some time.

For 90 percent of our applications, we are using IBM MQ for a point-to-point setup, from one application to another application. It is like a passage between them. For the other 10 percent of our applications, we are using topic subscriptions.

It's deployed on-premises. We have tried it on Docker Containers as well, where we have an instance. We haven't done a cluster setup using Docker and Kubernetes. 

It is very stable. We haven't seen any failures.

You should be able to increase the message size. It should be dynamic. Each queue has a limitation of 5,000. Also, the maximum message length defaults to 4 MB. If it is more than that it should be able to increase and allow whatever the particular size of the message is into the queue.

In terms of additional features, I would like to see it be lightweight and go to the cloud easily, and dynamic scaling should be added.

I have been using IBM MQ for the last five years at my current company but I also used it in different agencies, so overall I have used it for about seven years.

It is scalable but we have to do it manually. There is no automation for scaling it.

Support is very good. It is very fast. If an issue is Priority 1 they will respond very quickly and call you.

It is pretty easy to set up. The installation takes less than five minutes for each server. People can learn IBM MQ in one week.

Even a version upgrade can be done easily. Including doing backups and installation, it can be completed in 10 to 15 minutes. Even RabbitMQ and Kafka require more steps for setup than IBM MQ. Installation of the IBM product is very simple. 

For individual projects, IBM MQ may cost more. Here, we are using it globally. It is distributed around the world for our operations, so cost-wise it is less for us. But if you go with individual licenses, the cost of IBM is much more.

We are also slowly moving forward into using Kafka.

We calculated the costs for our total environment of going with RabbitMQ, and if we went with priority support for RabbitMQ versus the cost of IBM MQ, there was almost no difference in the costs. Unless we went fully open-source, we would not save anything with RabbitMQ.

My advice to someone who is looking into using IBM MQ would depend on their budget, the application criticality, etc. If applications are less critical, you can go with open-source products. 

Apache Kafka is growing quickly. People are using it on almost every project. The future will be Apache Kafka only and there might be some RabbitMQ use as well. But I see that Kafka is gaining the most. IBM MQ won’t support large streams of data but Kafka will support large streams of data. For example, for Big Data projects, will only go with Kafka.

IBM MQ is used to ensure that transactions are properly handled.

The most valuable feature of IBM MQ is transaction processing.

I have been using IBM MQ for approximately 10 years.

IBM MQ is stable.

The scalability of IBM MQ is good.

We have only customer transactions using IBM MQ.

I have used the support from IBM MQ. There is some room for improvement.

I rate the support from IBM MQ a four out of five.

Positive

I have not used another solution prior to IBM MQ.

The initial setup of IBM MQ is complex.

The price of IBM MQ could improve by being less expensive.

I rate the price of IBM MQ a three out of five.

I choose IBM MQ over other solutions because of personal comfort.

I would recommend IBM MQ to others that are using major transaction processing.

I rate IBM MQ an eight out of ten.

I use IBM HQ to communicate with subsystems within our plants e.g. the supply chain.

I've been using IBM HQ for eight years.

IBM HQ's stability is great - we send six million messages a day, and we're very satisfied with HQ's ability to handle that volume.

IBM HQ's scalability isn't the best.

IBM's technical support is great.

The initial setup was straightforward and took around half an hour.

We used an in-house team and a system integrator.

I would absolutely recommend IBM HQ to others as a very robust, reliable, responsive product. I would give IBM HQ a rating of nine out of ten.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients.

The primary use case for IBM MQ is handling the transportation of messages between applications.

This is being used in a mainframe environment.

Our clients complain about the price of this solution but otherwise, they have not had any problems with it. They are very happy with the quality of the product.

This product has good security.

There is no data loss while transporting messages.

The licensing fees should be more cost-effective so that we can better pitch the product to our clients. With the pricing as it is, they tend to move away from IBM products. They look for other solutions, such as open-source products.

I have been working with IBM MQ for fifteen years.

This product is used on a daily basis and it is quite stable. In terms of reliability, I would rate it a five out of five.

I have not found any issues related to scalability.

We have multiple clients that use IBM MQ.

We handle the support that initially comes in from our clients. If we have any problem, then we take it to IBM using a PMR (Problem Management Report). When there is an issue then we feel that we can go to them.

We did not use another similar solution prior to IBM MQ.

IBM MQ is not at all difficult to set up.

There is no deployment, per se. A broker will handle the deployment.

We handle the implementation and maintenance in-house. The number of people required for maintenance depends on the team. Our team members support multiple accounts.

The problem with this product is that it's a little bit expensive. This is one of the main challenges that we face with our clients. The charges are high and there should be a less costly solution available. This is especially true when you consider it in comparison to open-source tools that are available.

Overall, I am very happy with this product and my only complaint is that the price is high. I definitely recommend it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.