On November 22, 2024 IBM released IBM Z OMEGAMON AI for CICS V6.1. This new release introduces Machine Learning (ML) capabilities to help clients to quickly identify transaction performance abnormalities. The release also delivers significantly greater capacity to monitor transactions together with features which make it easier to identify issues and manage features, all while reducing the General CPU consumption of the product.
With the introduction of IBM Z OMEGAMON AI Insights V2.1 with IBM Z OMEGAMON AI for CICS V6.1 Machine Learning capabilities are included with the product. It is now possible to alert on significant divergence of CPU and transaction response times. This capability allows clients to detect outliers without the need to determine specific thresholds.
OMEGAMON CICS has improved the capacity of Task History to now allow a maximum size of 16TB. This is an over four thousand fold increase from the previous maximum. This will give clients the ability to store significantly more history, which can be retrieved to enable problem identification. Task History now has the ability to be paused, or started in a paused state which allows clients to view previously collected data without fear that it could be overwritten.
OMEGAMON has significantly reduced the General CPU consumption by not only making use of specialty engines to process task history and more components of data collection in the OMEGAMON CICS agent address space, but by also processing end of task data in CICS more efficiently. When using the recommended settings for the features of OMEGAMON, all the processes which run in the collector address space will now be predominantly of zIIP engines.
Bookmarking is now allowed for select workspaces within OMEGAMON CICS Enhanced 3270 User Interface. If a workspace in the Enhanced 3270 User Interface has the (B) Indication following the name, the workspace is allowed to be bookmarked.
For OMEGAMON CICS this applies to the results of the FIND command.
With this capability a client can save a frequently used search such as, all the active tasks on a specific LPAR or group of regions.
Once saved simply typing the name ("GRP1TASKS") will take you directly to the workspace from any Enhanced 3270UI workspace.
The CICS task Timings screen has been simplified to make it easier to determine the values impacting your task performance. Times are categorized by if the task is waiting or active while the interval is being measured. These are displayed with a graph which indicates the percentage of the overall task time.
When a task is started via another CICS task OMEGAMON will now show information about the original task as well as the prior task in sequence. This may be either the prior hop if the task was in a different CICS region or prior task if it is from the same region.
Dynamic Resource limiting (RLIM) changes can now be made across a group of regions simultaneously with changes introduced with this release. When making changes to definitions in RLIM if the Multi option is set to yes a new panel will give the client the ability to select a group of regions to receive the command.
IBM Z OMEGAMON AI for CICS Transaction Gateway has improved statistical reporting for XA two-phase commit (2PC) transactions. The Transaction Analysis workspace in e3270UI displays newly added metrics such as number of currently active XA transactions and the maximum XA transaction limit, as was specified via the CTG_XA_MAX_TRAN environment variable for each Gateway Daemon, the peak number of XA transactions and total number of XA requests processed. This allows clients to alert before number of concurrent XA transactions reaches its maximum limit.
The program tracking feature of OMEGAMON CICS has been updated to account for the storage obtained for a program. This will show the total amount of storage request while the program was in control in the User 24 and User 31 subpools for the task.