Overview of the CICS Interdependency Analyzer

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This section gives an overview of the CICS® Interdependency Analyzer (CICS IA), and describes its components.

CICS IA is a run time tool for use with CICS Transaction Server for z/OS®. It has four purposes:
  1. To identify the sets of resources used by individual CICS transactions and their relationships to other resources. Then you can understand the characteristics of your application set: you can see what a CICS region contains; what resources a transaction needs in order to run; and which programs use which resources. Thus your ability to maintain, enhance, modify, or redistribute your applications is much improved.

    This function of CICS IA is described in CICS IA interdependency functions.

  2. To identify possible transaction affinities. Affinities require particular groups of transactions to be run either in the same CICS region, or in a particular region. The ability to identify transaction affinities is useful in a dynamic routing environment: you need to know of any restrictions that prevent particular transactions being routed to particular application-owning regions (AORs); or that require particular transactions to be routed to particular AORs.

    This function of CICS IA is described in CICS IA affinity related functions.

  3. To identify and analyze resource usage flow within a transaction or transactions. This is done using the Command Flow feature. It allows individual users to capture all CICS/Db2®/MQ/IMS commands in chronological order. The data is stored in Db2 tables, and each individual user can populate these tables with their own data. The CICS IA Explorer plug-in provides a new view to list all the Command Flow captures by a userid.

    This function of CICS IA is described in CICS IA Command Flow functions.

  4. To identify and list threadsafe status of applications and show where the changes into and out of the QR TCB are performed. This is done using dependency data, and the current TCB mode is also shown in the command flow.

    This function of CICS IA is described in The Command Flow Feature.

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