Setting up multiple CICS-WebSphere MQ bridge monitors

If you expect a high volume of requests for CICS® applications through the CICS-WebSphere MQ bridge, consider setting up additional bridge monitors in further CICS regions. You might also want to use additional bridge monitors to provide more granular security.

About this task

The default transaction ID for the bridge monitor is CKBR, but you can change this or define additional transaction IDs.

When you set up multiple bridge monitors, you can create a separate request queue for each bridge monitor for its sole use. The advantage of this approach is that you may give each bridge monitor different service characteristics. However, the disadvantage is that applications must know the name of the appropriate request queue to use when making requests through the CICS-WebSphere MQ bridge. For this reason, you might prefer to have several bridge monitors share the same request queue.

If you decide to use a shared request queue with several bridge monitors, ensure that you follow these requirements:

Procedure

  • All bridge monitors must be associated with queue managers at WebSphere® Version 6 or later. Do not attempt to run multiple bridge monitors on a shared queue with bridge monitors attached to a system earlier than WebSphere MQ Version 5.3.1, which leads to unpredictable results.
  • Each CICS region that is running a bridge monitor must have a unique SYSID.
  • All transactions in a 3270 pseudoconversation must specify the remote SYSID returned by the first transaction in all subsequent messages in the pseudoconversation. The remote SYSID is required even if you use CICS transaction routing facilities to direct the transactions to other CICS regions.
  • You must define CICS ISC links between all the CICS regions where bridge monitors are running.
  • If you use passtickets for user validation, all bridge monitors for a queue must specify the same APPLID using the PASSTKTA parameter when the bridge monitors are started.

What to do next

For problem determination with multiple CICS bridge monitors, you might have to look at all the logs of all the CICS regions to find any error messages produced by the bridge. You can use the command DISPLAY QSTATUS(queuename) TYPE(HANDLE) on each queue manager to show which CICS regions have the queue open.