CICS Interdependency Analyzer (Function and Highlights)

The Mainframe remains one of the primary workhorses of the computer world. Mainframes can process massive amounts of data; processing over 70 percent of the world’s most important computing transactions every day. Organizations like banks, credit card companies, medical facilities, stock brokerages, and others depend on the Mainframe for job processing and cannot afford errors and downtime. ​

The Mainframe systems are also growing and evolving with the business. Because of new functionalities, changing corporate standards, technical requirements, and business pressures, many techniques for implementing applications have been used. Accordingly, this growth has not been as structured as it must have been. As a result, many applications and services share common resources, and changes in one area typically affects many others. Unstructured growth can reach to such a level that the system can no longer be developed in a controlled manner without a full understanding of these interrelationships. CICS IA can help you achieve this understanding.
 
CICS IA records the interdependencies between resources such as files, programs, and transactions by monitoring programming commands that operate on resources. It also captures transaction affinities and command flow for one or more transactions.
 
INTRODUCTION TO CICS IA
CICS IA for z/OS is a run-time Discovery Tool for CICS Transaction Server (CICS TS) that allows you to fully understand the CICS resource relationships within your environment. CICS IA collects Dependency data, Affinity Data, and Command Flow Data.


Dependency Data
Dependency data helps to identify the set of resources used by individual CICS transactions and their relationships to other resources. Then you can understand the characteristics of your application set as follows:

Thus, your ability to maintain, enhance, modify, or redistribute your applications is much improved.
 
Affinity Data
Affinity data helps to identify possible transaction affinities. Affinities require particular groups of transactions to be run either in the same CICS region or in a particular region. The ability to identify transaction affinities is useful in a dynamic routing environment as follows: you need to know of any restrictions that prevent particular transactions being routed to application-owning regions (AORs) or that require particular transactions to be routed to particular AORs.
 
 
Command flow Data
To identify and analyze resource usage flow within a transaction or transactions. This is done using the Command Flow feature. It allows individual users to capture all CICS/DB2/MQ/IMS commands in chronological order. The data is stored in DB2 tables, and each individual user can populate these tables with their own data. The CICS IA Explorer plug-in provides a view to list all the Command Flow captures by a User Id. It also captures TCB Switches and Region switches during the transaction execution.
 
Figure 1 shows the high-level architecture of CICS IA.​

Figure 1: High-Level Architecture of CICS IA

CICS IA HIGHLIGHTS
 
Here are some of the benefits of using CICS IA:

• Automates collection of runtime resource relationships.
• Impact analysis of routine application maintenance for the developer.
• Understands application flow with flexible resource-relationship reports.
• Compares applications and resources across regions and platforms.
• Upgrades your CICS TS release quicker.
• Builds your own SQL queries to answer your questions on your CICS resource relationships.
• Helps you identify and deploy CICS application events.
• Visualizes your resource usage by region, transaction, or program.
• Tracks your workload from start to finish including “CICS transaction data”.
• Dedicated Collector for identifying your Affinities and reporting them by Affinity Type. The ability to build CICSPlex System Manager (CPSM) Workload Manager (WLM) Transaction groups that can be assigned to your WLM policy.
• The CICS command flow feature also assists with threadsafe analysis by showing you the commands that introduce TCB swaps.
• Helps to identify resources used by web service and in which CICS region a web service is deployed.
• Generate threadsafe report to identify the commands that are non-threadsafe in your application program.
• By using the Scanner component of CICS IA, it is possible to write a program to examine the program load modules and report on the EXEC CICS commands and their parameters.
• The CSECT Scanner scans load modules for information that can be used to identify the version of each CSECT.

Ashokkumar Selvaraj
Senior Developer – HCL Software