Ramblings of an integration guy

Are you getting the message? IBM MQ - it's a beast but it's also the beast that's best at what it does - getting messages from A to B and not losing them. If you don't believe me then speak to the world's banks and see what they use. But, nothing is perfect and IBM MQ is old. It shows its age in some obvious ways - the security model is treacherous. I would also say that having, how many is it now...? 5 different ways to achieve HA (https://developer.ibm.com/articles/mq-ha-dr-options/), shows just how complex a beast it can be. Never mind the number of switches and options you have when setting up the queues and clients.  But... I still love it. It's what I specialise in and I still think it's a product that does what it says on the can - not lose your messages. However, wait for it.... it's biggest problem is.... I never know where my messages are at any give point in time. Trapping messages in MQ is hard so trusting that your message has been and gone ...

Which partners are using my Sterling B2Bi? One of the problems we have in integration is knowing just which partners are using my services. Silly as this sounds it's a real problem. Over time customers come and go, services get replaced, customers  migrate to different services. Service Management API-Management knew this was a problem from the beginning - they have the in-built concept of managing who's using the APIs and you can, reasonably easily, deprecate APIs and track who is using them. However, the likes of IBM Sterling B2Bi do not have that concept. To find out whether a customer is currently  using a sterling hosted service requires some clever database searches which are deep in the bowels of the product. It's not alone in having this problem - many integration products have little partner usage visibility. They all take great care in onboarding customers but lose track of who's still using the services over time. Opsis usage tracking Opsis, Coliance's bu...