z/VSE: 45 Years of Progress - z/VM - IBM

The
operational
processes
for
addressing
CICS-related
application
quickly as they could be and this has a
negative effect on the overall service
provided.
Occasionally, there will be something
obviously amiss in the CICS
regions involved and the traditional
CICS monitors, in situ, may provide the
insight needed to begin the investigation
and recovery. Just as often, the traditional
CICS monitors offer no
immediate clues. Even with a starting
point, it can take time to understand the
flow and use of CICS resources involved
in the problem application.
Where problems regularly occur, the
CICS support areas may start to keep
some informal notes about what to look
for in relation to a given application
name. However, these notes must be
referenced quickly and by the whole
team, not just the individual who made
them. It’s vital that the CICS support
area, the application support team, and
anyone else who is expected to support
CICS-based business applications, know
exactly what to look at when calls come
in about a problem with an application.
That knowledge often resides in informally
held knowledge bases that individuals
use.
What’s needed is a complete guide to
the resources a given application uses
and the ability to observe individual
components using a CICS monitor solution.
Ideally, an automated means of
presenting this information should be
available—one that can show the status
of all aspects of the infrastructure in
one easy-to-use view.
Tools available to the support staff
should collect and display applicationspecific
monitoring data for immediate
use where it’s needed. The traditional
monitors in use at most sites are only
able to associate a user-chosen or application
name with transaction response
time type data. This is inadequate, but
may at least provide a crude starting
point, though typically the systems programmer
needs to log on to the specific
monitor that will provide this information
and visibility may only be provided
on one specific CICS region even
though the resources may be spread
across multiple CICS regions.
In summary, the operational processes
for addressing CICS-related
application issues are suboptimal at
many sites. In the heat of an incident,
support personnel don’t know and can’t
visualize the entire CICS footprint of
the named application reported to be
having problems. Time is wasted and
service-impacting incidents are prolonged.
Z
Stephen Mitchell has worked in the IBM mainframe
arena for 26 years, most of that time as a CICS systems
programmer. He is now the managing director of Matter
of Fact Software; the company developed PlexSpy
Application Status Monitor to streamline the support processes
surrounding CICS.
Email: stephen.mitchell@matteroffactsoftware.com
Website: www.plexspy.com
issues are
suboptimal
at many
sites.
Figure 1: An Example of a Scalable CICS Application Infrastructure
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