I am interfacing with a Websphere MQ system, using Python/pymqi.  From time to time, I will need to:

check the status of an MQ channel
start/restart a channel that is not running

How can I achieve the above?
Pymqi documentation doesn't appear to cover this, despite having very good coverage of dealing with MQ queues.
You should never need to check the status of a channel or start it, from an application. This is probably why the documentation does not have much coverage on this as it is not an expected thing for an application to do.
Instead, your channel should be configured to automatically start when messages need to be moved across it, so it is always running when you need it to be. This is known as Triggering.
If there is an issue with the network connection the channel is using, the channel will retry and remake the connection again too, so you do not need to check the status of the channel from your application.
How can I restart an MQ channel using pymqi?