TCP/IP monitoring

TCP/IP is a communication protocol used between physically separated computer systems. TCP/IP can be implemented on a wide variety of physical networks. TCP/IP is a large family of protocols that is named after its two most important members, Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol.

Internet Protocol (IP) is a network-layer protocol. It provides a connectionless data transmission service, and supports both TCP and User Datagram Protocol (UDP). Data is transmitted link by link; an end-to-end connection is never set up during the call. The unit of data transmission is the datagram.

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a transport-layer protocol. It provides a connection-oriented data transmission service between applications, that is, a connection is established before data transmission begins. TCP has more error checking that UDP.

UDP is a transport-layer protocol and is an alternative to TCP. It provides a connectionless data transmission service between applications. UDP has less error checking than TCP. If UDP users want to be able to respond to errors, the communicating programs must establish their own protocol for error handling. With high-quality transmission networks, UDP errors are of little concern.

For more information about TCP/IP, see Internet, TCP/IP, and HTTP concepts.

You can use TCP/IP management and control to save the data collected by CICS® so that it can be examined offline, at some point after the tasks and resources to which it relates are no longer available. You can also use TCP/IP management and control to obtain a CICSplex-wide view of the TCP/IP network and examine items in real time:
  • The TCP/IP network resources that a particular CICS region is using.
  • The work passing in and out of a particular CICS region over the TCP/IP network.
  • The CICS resources and tasks associated with a distributed transaction that flows across the CICSplex over the TCP/IP network.
  • The CICS region in which a distributed transaction originated.
You can use TCP/IP management and control to diagnose problems such as connectivity problems and transaction delays, to track work across the CICSplex, to monitor the CICSplex, and to capture system data over time for use in capacity planning.