ITCAM for Transactions data collectors on z/OS have filtering mechanisms for selecting portions of workloads for tracking and ignoring the rest. The overhead incurred by ITCAM for Transactions in a z/OS address space can be reduced, often significantly, through workload filtering where only units-of-work that are of interest are selected for tracking and the rest are excluded. This can be especially important where the overhead for ITCAM for Transactions to track an entire workload is considered too costly.

With ITCAM for Transactions v7.4, workload filtering is added for the ITCAM for IMS data collector, meaning that filtering is now available for all ITCAM for Transactions z/OS data collectors. The ITCAM for CICS, IMS, and CTG data collectors filter on individual transaction names; the ITCAM for MQ data collector filters on individual MQ queue names. Filtering is implemented for the data collectors through rules or control statements with selected transaction names or MQ queue names expressed in full or generically with trailing asterisks (*). The generic format means that usually very few rules are needed for filtering most workloads. Rules can be shared between data collectors of the same type, or a separate set of rules can be written for each address space with an ITCAM for Transactions on z/OS data collector.

Workload filtering and the rule formats are described for each data collector in the IBM Tivoli Composite Applications Manager for z/OS, Installation and Configuration Guide for z/OS, SC14-7412.