#Introduction:
IBM® OMEGAMON® for CICS® on z/OS® Application trace has been available for more than two decades. It allows application developers to see the flow of tasks by detailing each EXEC CICS request.
The amount of data that can be stored for a task used to be limited to a maximum of 32 1K blocks. This may have resulted in not all of the requests for a task being available. The number of trace entries can be from as many as about 1800 to a few as 350, depending upon how much the data changes between calls.
Recent Updates
With PTF UJ07731 (APAR OA62782), it is now possible to report much more data for the task. This data is stored together with the task details in the Task History datastore. For this reason, it is still useful to limit the amount recorded for a task. The data is now stored in 32K blocks. This is now stored in 64-bit storage as opposed to the 31-bit storage previously used. A task can have a limit of anywhere from 2 to 10 blocks.
Application Trace filters can be added, allowing you to filter for a specific Transaction ID, User ID or Terminal ID. These filters will now specify the maximum size to be recorded for a transaction that matches the filter. Filters can be specified to repeat hourly, daily, or weekly. If repeat filtering is requested, the filter will become active upon the start of the next interval.
To dynamically add an Application Trace filter for a specific CICS region, enter C next to the region in the CICSplex Regions Summary panel. This brings up the Control Functions panel. Enter A for Application trace. This brings up the CICS Application Trace Information panel, which shows the status of Application trace in the CICS region, and any filters that have been defined.
To define a new filter, enter A to the left of a Tran ID in the Application Trace Filters defined subpanel.
If you want filters to persist, add them to the Global Data area. This would be needed if the filter was permanent (ON all the time), or if the filter should repeat.
The following section would add a filter for the DPLS transaction at 9:30 every Monday. This would default to trace every userid or terminal id on which it ran, it would also default to all EXEC Calls and all Call types.
*
*
<APPLICATION_TRACE_FILTERS>
*
*
<<TRACE>>
TRAN=DPLS
SIZE=96
OWNER=MYUSER
DURATION=30
START_TIME=0930
REPEAT=WEEKLY,MON
*
Under the Global options, you can specify the default Maximum trace size. This will be used if no value is specified for a trace filter.
To assist in setting the trace, we now display the amount of trace data that OMEGAMON for CICS attempted to store for a task. If the task still exceeds the limit, you can see the size which would have been required.
Combining trace for related tasks
Another very powerful feature of OMEGAMON for CICS is the ability to tie together the transactions which make up a unit of work. In this example, a trace has been enabled for the DPLS transaction and also for the Mirror task CSMI in a region which owns part of the application.
If you were to view the task in History you would see that trace is active:
If you then select the Related tab, we can also see the related Mirror task.
From here, the T option will show the CICSplex-wide view of the trace for the task.
Here you can clearly see where the task switched from one region to another
For more information, see the following topics in IBM Documentation:
Controlling application trace using the enhanced 3270 user interface: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/om-cics/5.5.0?topic=configuring-controlling-application-trace-using-enhanced-3270-user-interface
CICSplex Application Trace Filters attribute group: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/om-cics/5.5.0?topic=attributes-cicsplex-application-trace-filters-attribute-group
Enabling trace facilities: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/om-cics/5.5.0?topic=tasks-enabling-trace-facilities
Tags:
#CICS#monitoring#OMEGAMON