System availability monitoring

With system availability monitoring (SAM), you can be notified if a CICS® system is not active at any point during its expected hours of operation.

You can also be notified if any of the following conditions should start or stop:
  • One or more CICS dynamic storage areas become short on storage (SOS).
  • A CICS system dump (SYSDUMP) is taken. This condition indicates that an MVS SVC dump has been requested.
  • A CICS transaction dump (TRANDUMP) is taken.
  • The CICS system has reached the maximum number of tasks (MAXTASK) it is allowed at any one time.
  • One or more resources have impacted the processing of a CICS application (STALL).

    A STALL condition occurs when resource contention impacts the processing of application tasks. Parameters you specify in the startup JCL determine when a CICSPlex® SM STALL message is issued. You can set the parameters conservatively, so that you receive notification while the system is still functioning, even though resource contention is having a serious impact.

    Resolution of a STALL condition might prevent a more serious situation (such as an SOS or MAXTASK) from occurring. For example, a lack of temporary storage could prevent a task from completing and trigger a STALL condition.

    For more information about the STALL parameters and a list of possible stall conditions, see CICSPlex SM system parameters.

If the CICS system becomes unavailable, or if one of the above conditions occurs, a severity level is assigned and the appropriate CICSPlex SM messages are issued.