Addressing OLTP Solutions with CICS: The Transaction Server ... - Ibm

8.2 Workload Management
112 CICS for AIX as the Transaction Server
• Discovery by CICS SM of changes to your CICS systems and optional
automatic definition of the discovered systems within the CICS SM database.
This function can save a significant amount of effort in getting CICS SM
initially implemented and assisting with the administration of your CICS
systems.
• Event monitoring, which enables you to subscribe to significant events in the
life of the CICS systems and their resources. You can subscribe, for
example, to the changes in the state of a CICS system. Then, if the health of
the CICS system becomes degraded, you are notified and can investigate
why there was this change in state.
• A GUI that enables you to act on the objects displayed (and thereby your
CICS systems and resources). You select actions through a menu or by
dragging and dropping.
Let us look at the main CICS SM functions in a little more detail.
With SPOC it is possible to operate all CICS systems and resources in the
enterprise from one workstation session. The physical location of the machine
on which these resources are located does not have to be known by the person
managing them. You log on once to CICS SM and from there manage all CICS
systems and resources without having to know where they are.
An SSI greatly reduces the impact of growing complexity. A user interacts with
one entity rather than a complex collection of CICS systems and resources. A
command can act on all CICS systems and resources in a group. It also reduces
the risk of failure of the operation. When manual changes are made on many
systems, one of the changes could be incorrect and have a potentially serious
impact on the CICS systems and hence the business of the enterprise.
You can use one action on a CICS system model to act on a group of CICS
systems. A CICS system model defines the initial values of attributes for one or
more identical systems. Similarly you can use one action on a configuration to
affect all CICS systems in the configuration. You could, for example, activate a
configuration to make all CICS systems available on several AIX nodes. One
command can operate on all of the necessary CICS systems and resources. The
same command does not have to be repetitively issued on each of the systems.
CICS SM workload management (workload management) with a suitable CICS
configuration can be used to improve the availability of applications in the event
of a system failure, make better use of the available processing power, and
allow seamless maintenance to be carried out. It is the function of workload
management to determine which CICS system is most appropriate to process a
piece of work.
Any CICS for AIX client or region with a program to run can be told which is the
best system to route work to on the basis of:
• Workload separation requirements, that is, the need to route particular
transactions to a particular group of CICS systems according to
user-supplied separation rules
• Workload balancing requirements, that is, the need to balance the workload
across a group of CICS systems with the decision as to which system to