IMS applications

Information Management System (IMS™) is a hierarchical database and information management system with transaction-processing capabilities. To determine how well business activities perform, you can use IBM® Business Monitor to monitor business events from IMS applications.

IMS Transaction Manager (TM) provides a standard environment for high-performance transaction execution. Many of the world's banks currently rely on IMS. For example, withdrawing money from an automated teller machine (ATM) most probably triggers an IMS transaction.

You can create applications that can calculate business metrics and monitor key performance indicators (KPI) using the web-based dashboards that IBM Business Monitor provides. After you create your IMS business logic, you can use existing IMS assets to monitor business activities, which helps you define and proactively manage business operations, identify new business opportunities, mitigate risks, and improve customer satisfaction.

IMS Version 11 supports event monitoring with IBM Business Monitor 6.2 or later. This support requires IMS Enterprise Suite SOAP Gateway and the XML-to-bytes mapping function in IBM Rational® Developer for System z® Version 7.6.

IMS Enterprise Suite is a separate product that you can order or download free of charge. SOAP Gateway is a component in the suite that enables IMS applications to interoperate outside the IMS environment through SOAP to provide and request services that are independent of platform, environment, application language, or programming model.

Rational Developer for System z provides the tool support for generating the XSD files from the IMS application copybook. The XSD file describes the structure of the incoming events from the IMS application. It is used as input to author a monitor model application that consumes the events. Rational Developer for System z also generates the correlator file and the XML converter from the WSDL file and the copybook to assist the correlation between XML data that is required for SOAP communication and the byte arrays data that IMS applications require. For more information about enabling an IMS application to emit business events and the detailed steps for generating all requisite artifacts for IBM Business Monitor, see the related link, IMS Enterprise Suite SOAP Gateway.

IMS users, who are typically application developers and system programmers working together, create or modify an IMS business application to identify the event capture points in the application and to queue the emitted messages that contain the business event to a specified transaction pipe (tpipe). The enhanced IMS Enterprise Suite SOAP Gateway pulls the business event message from the transaction pipe and, using the REST event emitter service, emits the event data to IBM Business Monitor.

To view a graphical representation of business events processing flow, see the related link, Business events processing flow. To view a tutorial that demonstrates using IBM Business Monitor to monitor business events emitted from IMS, see the related link, Monitoring business events emitted from IMS applications.