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Using the CICS Explorer to monitor tasks

Technical Blog Post


Abstract

Using the CICS Explorer to monitor tasks

Body

 

The CICS Explorer can very easily be used as a periscope to see what is going on in your CICS System. You probably currently look at running tasks in the system by using CEMT INQUIRE TASK or by using a monitor product, but did you know that the CICS Explorer provides as nice, easy, and graphical way to do this as well? Let me show you how.

Once you've established a connection to the host system, you can use the Operations > Tasks view to see the running tasks in your CICS regions. By default, the following columns are displayed: Task ID, Transaction ID, Run Status, User ID, Principal Facility, LU Name, Priority, Class Name, and Current Suspend Time. You can customize this view and add additional columns. The list of columns that you can add to this view is quite extensive and too many to list here, but you can see them all by clicking the little drop down arrow at the top right of the tasks view.

 

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Now let's say you wanted to use this view to monitor your tasks to see if any are hung and if so, on what resource. To do this, you might want to add the following columns to the tasks view: Attach Time, CPU Time, CPU Time on CP, Current Program, Suspend Time, and Suspend Reason. These fields should give you a good idea whether or not a task is hung, and what it is hung for. Here is an example:

 

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So in this example, you can see that transaction EGET has been suspended for over 1 minute and it is suspended waiting for EUDSA. Since you are SOS, you can now use the Explorer to purge the culprit EGET task and free up the storage and not need to recycle CICS to get out of this situation!

In addition to being able to use the Explorer to look at active, running tasks, you can also use it to view completed tasks, if you are using CPSM's History Recording. Now before you can use the Explorer to look at the completed tasks, you have to first set up History Recording in CPSM. Rather than rebuild the wheel, follow the instructions on setting up History Recording with CPSM in "CPSM History Recording - Instructions for Enabling"

Once History Recording is set up and active, you can now us the Explorer to review tasks. To do so, you will use the Operations > Completed Tasks view. Similar to the Tasks view, you can add additional columns to this view to see different fields you might be interested in. Please see an example of what this view might look like below:

 

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title image (modified) credit: (cc) Some rights reserved by Jeanne Masar

 

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UID

ibm11080789