Local and remote administration

You administer WebSphere MQ objects locally or remotely.

Local administration means carrying out administration tasks on any queue managers that you have defined on your local system. In WebSphere MQ, you can consider this as local administration because no WebSphere MQ channels are involved, that is, the communication is managed by the operating system. Some commands cannot be issued in this way, in particular, creating or starting queue managers and starting command servers. To perform this type of task, you must either log onto the remote system and issue the commands from there, or create a process that can issue the commands for you.

WebSphere MQ supports administration from a single point through what is known as remote administration. Remote administration consists of sending programmable command format (PCF) control messages to the SYSTEM.ADMIN.COMMAND.QUEUE on the target queue manager.

There are a number of ways of generating PCF messages. These are:

  1. Writing a program using PCF messages. See Administration using PCF commands.
  2. Writing a program using the MQAI, which sends out PCF messages. See Using the MQAI to simplify the use of PCFs.
  3. Using the WebSphere MQ Explorer, available with WebSphere MQ for Windows(R), which allows you to use a graphical user interface (GUI) and generates the correct PCF messages. See Using the WebSphere MQ Explorer.

For example, you can issue a remote command to change a queue definition on a remote queue manager.

Some commands cannot be issued in this way, in particular, creating or starting queue managers and starting command servers. To perform this type of task, you must either log onto the remote system and issue the commands from there or create a process that can issue the commands for you.