How to Revive WebSphere MQ Channels after time-out

IBM WebSphere MQ channels will be active until the messages flow through them. Once the time out occurs they will switch to the inactive state. The "Disconnect Interval" Property under the extended tab will decide the time out. This property should be set to an extreme value only after understanding the implications. If you set this time-out to a less value then there is a chance that it will make the channel go down frequently and also increases the Administrative or QM overhead. If this value is set to more than a day will make the reliability questionable... as there are all sorts of failures waiting to happen from the network side.

Once if the channel is inactive you can make it as active by manually starting it, or starting it through the triggering process.

Channel initiator should be in running state for the trigger to work. It is achieved by default from WMQ 7.X.X.X. This behaviour depends upon SCHINIT property of the QM if it is set to "QMGR" channel initiator will start when QM starts. One can check this by the following process:

DISPLAY QMGR SCHINIT

And we can set the property by executing...

ALTER QMGR SCHINIT(QMGR)

Once this is done we can setup triggering on the Transmission queue by setting its:

• Trigger Control to "ON"
• Trigger Type "First",
• Trigger Depth "1"
• Trigger Message Priority "0"
• Trigger Data "<ChannelName>"
• Initiation Queue "SYSTEM.CHANNEL.INITQ"

Once this is done Channel will be started as soon as there are messages in Transmission Queue.