Features and benefits of IMS Connect Extensions

IMS Connect Extensions provides a set of enhancements to the IMS™ Connect function of IMS. Collectively, these enhancements reduce the cost of providing TCP/IP access to IMS applications while improving the overall quality of service and increasing the security and auditability of IMS.

Diagnose and fix TCP/IP problems

IMS Connect Extensions helps you to administer and operate IMS Connect by providing the information you need to diagnose problems in real-time, and then, to fix problems, allowing you to change more IMS Connect options dynamically. You can use the ISPF Operations dialog or Operations Console for z/OS® Explorer to:

• View instrumentation for all active IMS Connect instances.
• View information on active sessions, highlighting delays and inactivity and TCP/IP statistics.
• View details of port status and utilization for systems or sysplexes, including dynamically added ports.
• Monitor IMS data stores across all of your systems for OTMA flood conditions.

Combined with IBM® IMS Problem Investigator for z/OS or IBM Transaction Analysis Workbench for z/OS, IMS Connect Extensions enables rapid problem determination, including the ability to view important state event information such as IMS data store and OTMA transaction member (tmember) availability, OTMA failures and timeouts, exit failures, and session errors.

Optimize TCP/IP performance

IMS Connect Extensions helps you better manage performance, accurately plan capacity, and dynamically manage workloads. IMS Connect Extensions collects internal event data from IMS Connect that you can use with IMS Performance Analyzer for z/OS. Using these products together, you can produce detailed performance reports with useful information including:

• Flow control data. For example: ACK, NAK, and OTMA.
• Internal and external transit times and latencies for IMS Connect transactions.
• Message activities. For example: OTMA, READ, and XMIT exits, read and write socket utilization, and security and commit confirm elapsed times.
• Network activity. For example: port and socket utilization, amount of data processed and accepted, and read and write socket request counts.
• IMS information. For example: resume tpipe requests, including information on each command type.

IMS Connect Extensions helps you manage IMS Connect workloads by providing flexible control of input message traffic. It can balance workloads between eligible data stores and reroute all messages to an alternate IMS data store when a given IMS data store is unavailable or in a flood condition. IMS Connect Extensions can also reject input messages or generate warnings when a user-defined message rate is exceeded. Sets of OTMA routing rules or ODBM routing rules can be assigned to different routing plans, and IMS Connect Extensions can be switched dynamically from one routing plan to another.

Manage all your IMS Connect systems from a single user interface

IMS Connect Extensions provides a management interface that:

• Centralizes all operations. Operators can work a Group view that organizes systems by sysplex, location, business unit, or any other grouping that you choose.
• Provides an easy-to-use sysplex view of your IMS Connect instances, including remote IMS Connect systems over an MSC link.
• Integrates monitoring with command and control capabilities.

IMS Connect Extensions includes both an ISPF Operations dialog and the Operations Console for z/OS Explorer. The Operations Console is an Eclipse-based PC application that provides a graphical interface to perform IMS Connect Extensions operations. It allows you to monitor and control IMS Connect systems and their components and active sessions from a distributed workstation. You can perform tasks such as monitoring IMS Connect throughput, monitoring IMS data store health and activity, analyzing and controlling client sessions, issuing IMS Connect WTOR commands and IMS Connect z/OS commands, IMS type-1 commands, and IMS Connect Extensions commands, starting and stopping traces, or viewing logs. Operations functions are secured with flexible access control rules, allowing you to tailor which commands users can issue based on their role in your organization.

Maximize the availability and reliability of IMS Connect

IMS Connect Extensions helps you meet service-level objectives by maximizing IMS and IMS Connect availability with these features:

• Suspend routing of messages to an IMS data store, allowing it to be drained of in-progress transactions. This can reduce the likelihood of transactions failing or being rejected when IMS is shut down.
• Set session message limits to specify the maximum number of input messages for a persistent session before the session is automatically closed. In an IMS sysplex distributor environment, if you design your applications to automatically reconnect when the session is closed, new persistent sessions will be routed to the IMS Connect with the lowest session totals. This feature is particularly useful when an IMS Connect system is being brought back online to quickly rebalance your persistent sessions across IMS Connect systems.
• Develop, set, and dynamically adjust routing plans for OTMA and ODBM workloads and adjust distribution of work according to the capacity of each IMS data store or ODBM target. These can be used to respond to differing periods of demand or planned maintenance outages.
• Respond to changing data store conditions such as processing status and number of active connections.
• Control access to IMS Connect instances via a system authorization facility (SAF) security class.
• Refresh IMS Connect SAF security profiles dynamically.
• Control access to an OTMA transaction or DRDA® request based on the client IP address and IMS Connect port number.
• Add, delete, or reload some IMS Connect message exits without interrupting IMS Connect.
• Dynamically add data store capacity and adjust workload balancing profiles.

Automate IMS Connect operations with REXX

Use the IMS Connect Extensions host command environment for REXX to automate IMS Connect operational tasks and to integrate IMS functions from other REXX command interfaces such as the IMS REXX SPOC API and the SDSF REXX programming interface. Use the host command environment for REXX to automatically respond to scenarios such as an IMS Connect system approaching MAXSOC, or when an IMS Connect system is being brought back online and you want to use session limits to quickly rebalance workload across IMS Connect systems.

Expose near-real time IMS Connect transaction summary data to analytics engines

Monitor IMS Connect, track trends, and to visualize different workloads in your topology using the IMS Connect Extensions feed and the features of your analytics platform.

Record and report IMS Connect activity with IBM IMS Performance Analyzer for z/OS

IMS Performance Analyzer provides a comprehensive set of reports from the IMS Connect performance and accounting data collected by IMS Connect Extensions. IMS Connect Extensions records information about the transactions IMS Connect processes. Records are collected throughout the transaction. These records provide information on performance, response time, and throughput. For example:

• Performance and response time information for IMS, IMS Connect, and user message exits.
• Availability information for data stores and ports.
• Throughput information for different programming models; for example, conversational, non-conversational, and Send Only.
• Resource availability.

Enhance security for IMS Connect

IMS™ Connect Extensions enhances the security features of IMS Connect with the following security options:

• Verify the supplied authenticator (password, PassTicket, or passphrase) for the user ID associated with the incoming message.
• Check if the user ID associated with the incoming message is authorized to access IMS Connect and/or validate the source IP address.
• Cache ACEE security control block for improved performance.
• Use IP address rules to treat messages coming from an IP address as a trusted user or to assign a specific user ID to the request.