Automation Features to Save Time and Effort on MQ Administration
As the Customer Success Manager for Avada Software, I have heard from our customers a lot about how certain automation features of Infrared360 have had impactful benefits across their enterprise. Two crucial automation features we hear about a lot include our Certificate Management feature and our Reporting functionalities.
SSL/TSL Certificate Management
The Infrared360 MQ Certificate Inspector part of our cert management allows a user to inspect the certificates available on an endpoint and, if required, pull them into a local trust store or create one if there is none. Options in the Certificate Inspector include Fetch Key Store, View Certificate from Host, and Add Certificate to Key Store.
Something some of our customers find really powerful is the ability to filter the cert monitor to alert for Mgrs. with specific qualities and alert to automate based on that criteria;. An example would be Qmgr certs that are managed by a specific team, send the alert just to that team, and automate the renewal request.
One of the coolest things is if a Certificate is about to expire, Infrared360 can generate an alert to inform the user, as well as renew the certificate all on its own. Since IBM MQ uses a proprietary key repository called Key Database (KDB), Infrared360 is the only MQ Administration solution with key management software that can access the KDB. So, other Key Management software can request new certs, but cannot replace them. For that, you have to do it manually or write a script that requires deployment (an added security risk) and maintenance (what if the person who wrote that script leaves???). With Infrared360, it’s as simple as a press of a button.
Infrared360 can renew 100’s of certificates with 1 click as opposed to taking an hour just to do one with other solutions. That’s hundreds of hours saved just from automating MQ certificate renewal.
Reporting
Another great automation capability that’s often touted by our customers is automated reporting capabilities.
With IT being an important part of innovation in a business, delivering reliable reporting to management in a timely manner is very important. This allows for full visibility into your middleware stack to help problem solve and ensure everything is working as needed. This can help improve performance as well by making sure any problems are spotted before there is a critical issue so the informed decision making from these timely reports is imperative.
With Infrared360 there are tons of different things you can do with reporting, but the main idea is getting the important information to specific users or groups at the time they need it. Infrared360 can generate reports on whatever data you need and send them automatically to your users as an HTML report, PDF, CSV and/or an excel spreadsheet.. So if you need a daily/weekly/monthly report, you can set that up and send it automatically to whoever needs it, even if they are not a user of Infrared360! Generating reports manually can still be done if needed. Automating the process allows you to save time you can use for more valuable initiatives.
One other trick you can do is customize reporting to avoid report fatigue. Report fatigue is when an any one person or team gets an overwhelming number of reports and gets desensitized. This leads to people tasked with responding to important reports to miss or ignore them. By only setting up reports to specific people or teams who need them or will find the information of importance, reports become more useful to the teams, people, and management that you support. Automating this process is another way you can save some time with MQ Automation and make yourself more efficient.
Looking for other ways you can save time and effort on MQ Administration? Check out “Improving Productivity Through Smart, Safe, Self-Service.”
