CICS® performance data provides detailed CICS transaction-level information, such as, the elapsed time of processors and transactions, and time spent waiting for I/O. CICS writes at least one performance monitoring record for every transaction. CICS performance data also provides detailed resource-level data that can be used for accounting, performance analysis, and volumes planning.

Since CICS performance data is very important in CICS daily use and maintenance, whether CICS transactions are normal or not has become the area that customers focus on. IBM Z Common Data Provider (ZCDP) provides SMF_110_1_KPI data stream to help you collect key performance indicators (KPIs) of CICS to conduct problems analysis, performance evaluation and rational resources management. With ZCDP, you can also customize data streams to collect. For your different needs, ZCDP provides different data, and defines data output and data operation rules. Now, let’s see how ZCDP can help you analyze CICS performance data.


ZCDP and CICS performance

As your IT architecture is constantly improving and extending, it will inevitably become more and more complicated. In this case, intelligent operation and maintenance is especially practical.

In daily work, CICS operation and maintenance is a top priority. After deploying some specific PTFs, System Administrators need to make a comprehensive analysis of current CICS performance. You can have a full knowledge of whether the system runs normally, whether transactions response is normal, what indicators change, and how these changes will affect the subsequent operation of the system.

CICS system problems are reflected on abnormal transactions data first. Generally, before deploying PTF, use ZCDP to collect SMF_110_1_KPI, and build the performance benchmarks for PTF deployment. You can collect data over different periods to ensure that the benchmarks are valid. After PTF is deployed, use ZCDP again to collect CICS performance data, and make a comparison between the data and performance benchmarks built before PTF deployment. The dashboards of analytics platforms, such as IBM Z Operations Analytics, Elastic Stack and Splunk, provide an intuitive interface, and you can view the performance differences before and after system maintenance on the dashboards easily.

You can also collect CICS KPIs with ZCDP to monitor CICS system resources use. From daily CICS performance data, you can get the model that CICS applications use CPU and memory through machine learning, and at the same time, monitor the overall CPU and memory usage of the system. If exceptions occur when system CPU and memory or a CICS application uses resources, ZCDP will give an early warning. System Administrators can check the dashboards of analytics platforms to find the exceptions, track and solve problems with system and application log. With ZCDP, system administrators can realize intelligent system operation and maintenance.


SMF_110_1_KPI data stream

SMF_110_1_KPI data stream provides 28 KPIs for CICS transactions:

• CICS transactions start time, stop time, elapsed time, name and statistics. If you need to set up algorithms to charge users for the use of resources, you can use this type of collected data to update the expense information in your organization’s accounting programs.
• The total number of syncpoint requests that are issued by the user task in a certain period of time (interval), the elapsed time during which the user task waited for input from the terminal operator after the user task issued a RECEIVE request, the elapsed time of the transaction, the total processor time during which the user task was dispatched by the CICS dispatcher domain on each CICS TCB under which the task ran, and the total elapsed time during which the user task was dispatched, etc. You can use this information to deploy CICS tasks and adjust CICS performance.

Define SMF_110_1_CUST data stream

Apart from the 28 CICS KPIs collected by SMF_110_1_KPI data stream, CICS performance data provides detailed CICS transaction-level and resource-level information. You can define your own data streams, and collect more performance data.

Note：

In the IBM Z Common Data Provider User Guide for ZCDP 2.1 version,  we provide a topic called “Streaming key performance indicators for CICS Transaction Server for z/OS monitoring (https://ibm.co/2TLPr6P)”, which describes in detail how to collect KPIs to monitor CICS TS, including how to create DEFINE TEMPLATE statement to customize the data streams, how to define SMF_110_1_CUST, and how to update your development platform to ensure that data is properly streamed to the open end.

CICS® performance monitoring records data are critical to the maintenance and monitoring of CICS system. With the help of ZCDP to collect CICS performance data, you can collect customized data according to your needs, perform different calculations, and realize intelligent operation and maintenance of CICS system:

• Monitoring transactions response time: for example, you can use INTERVAL (START, STOP) to calculate the elapsed time it takes for a transaction request from starting to being processed.
• Monitoring processor usage: USRCPUT_TOD records the time that transactions use CPU. You can calculate average CPU usage with SUM(USRCPUT_TOD/4096E6)/RECORDS.
• Monitoring storage usage: for example, SUM (SCUSRHWM) provides the maximum amount (high-water mark) of user storage (bytes) allocated to the user task below the 16 MB line in the user dynamic storage area (UDSA). SUM (SCUSRSTG) provides storage occupancy of the user task below the 16 MB line in the UDSA in kilobyte seconds.
• Monitoring volumes and throughput.
• Monitoring CICS resources use.
• Monitoring files and data bases usage.

Summary

That’s it for this article. Hope now you have a good understanding of how to use ZCDP to monitor CICS performance. In addition to collecting CICS KPIs with the data streams that ZCDP provides, you can also customize data streams according to your needs, collect and analyze different performance data, and realize intelligent operation and maintenance.