IBM CICS

Customer Information Control System (CICS) Transaction Server is IBM's general-purpose transaction processing software for z/OS. It is a powerful application server that is used for transaction-processing in both large and small enterprises, supporting large transaction volumes with a fast and consistent response time. CICS Transaction Server for z/OS version 4.1 also supports event processing, which introduces integration capabilities with IBM® Business Monitor.

CICS event processing provides a noninvasive methodology for enhancing business applications. Events are defined and controlled independently of the business logic, extending or monitoring a business application without any modification. You can use this event processing support to monitor business processes in a CICS system. IBM Business Monitor can monitor these CICS business events.

In an enterprise network, for example, a business event can be produced when there is some occurrence that is significant to the operation, monitoring, or management of the business. IBM Business Monitor can be used to monitor these events. For example, IBM Business Monitor can monitor the business events from a CICS retail catalog order application and in turn provide key performance indicator (KPI) information such as:

Total dollar value of sales for the current month
Number of orders canceled in the previous month
Average dollar value per order year-to-date
Average time for order completion
Number of service level agreements met

How it works

CICS event processing support allows users to identify and specify the significant business events that are to be emitted by applications. The CICS event binding editor, a part of the CICS Explorer, is used to create event specifications, which are installed in the CICS system. At run time, CICS uses the event specifications to detect and capture events.

Each event specification describes how the data in the event payload is obtained from the data available at the time an event occurs in the application. These event specifications are grouped together into event bindings. The event binding is the unit for deploying, enabling, and disabling the CICS events that it contains. An application analyst deploys the event bindings to the CICS system and enables event emissions.

For each event binding, a CICS event processing (EP) adapter configuration is specified. The adapter transforms event data into an appropriate output format and then uses a transport mechanism to route events so that they are available to potential event consumers. For IBM Business Monitor–CICS integration, the output is in Common Base Events format, and the transport mechanism is WebSphere MQ. The bridge between WebSphere MQ and the Common Event Infrastructure (CEI) on the IBM Business Monitor server is a WebSphere MQ link.