Nastel Technologies announced the release of MQSonar, a free tool for isolating faults in and measuring baseline performance of applications based on IBM’s WebSphere MQ (WMQ).

Nastel’s MQSonar, available as a free download, can generate particularly valuable insight for enterprises using home-grown monitoring and management applications for WebSphere MQ.

Like SONAR in a submarine, MQSonar sends out a “ping,” waits for it to echo back and analyzes the time the transmission takes to return. Measuring the time the ping takes to move between components and to complete its journey can help organizations easily and effectively identify whether flaws lie in a particular queue or queue manager or throughout the wider system.

Installed on the WMQ server behind the corporate firewall, MQSonar requires no set-up, so operators with basic rights to the server can begin acquiring valuable insight from the tool immediately.

“Using MQSonar, organizations can gain new insights into the world of application monitoring, helping them to set baseline performance levels and identify bottlenecks without any real heavy lifting,” said Charles Rich, vice president of Product Management at Nastel Technologies. “We are offering unique, free, out-of-the-box capabilities that will facilitate improved performance and availability and provide a bridge to an even more advanced level analysis available in Nastel’s AutoPilot® product family.”

Using MQSonar, organizations can determine if performance is slow based on issues relating to a particular queue manager, allowing operators to quickly and efficiently fix the problem. Often, configuration discrepancies are the hidden root cause of performance failures.

MQSonar can be used to validate performance across multiple queue managers. Performance can be compared and thus, the misconfigured configuration item is identified. MQSonar can isolate the hops between queue managers that are slow, and it can verify that the path to designated applications is set up properly.

In a typical scenario, a user can test the response time it takes to access a WebSphere MQ queue manager. Using MQSonar to send a default test message to a test queue and then echo it back to the user, the user would capture the message path response times, hop by hop, and compile a report. The user can then run multiple instances of MQSonar and collect statistics about the performance of different queues and queue managers, giving him more visibility into the performance of the whole system.

Register here to download your free copy of MQSonar