Application Trace Facility overview

The Application Trace Facility (ATF) collects and displays summary-level metrics and detailed transaction events data. By analyzing the data, you can understand how the monitored transactions operate and perform.

The ATF component collects detailed data about IMS Monitor events that occur within one or more transactions. The ATF supports the MPP, JMP, IFP, BMP, JBP, CICS/DBCTL, and ODBA IMS application and region types, and collects the following types of data:
  • Application abends
  • Application API call details for each occurrence of a DL/I, Db2 SQL, MQ, and z/OS connect call
  • Application elapsed times and processor times for each event and associated region
  • External subsystems events that are related to the processing of DB2® and MQ threads
  • Other IMS Monitor events that are associated with API calls
  • Properties of a transaction and its environment, such as the region where the transaction runs
  • Transaction scheduling and termination
You can view ATF data and use it to complete these tasks:
  • Fine-tune applications
  • Identify applications based on exception criteria (for example, abends, elapsed times, and processor time thresholds)
  • Identify transaction response-time components
  • Understand how application programs operate
Note: For non-message-driven BMP, ATF puts the job name in the Transaction Name field.

The ATF component can write, to the IMS logging environment, one record per transaction or program execution instance. The record contains summaries of DL/I, DB2, and MQ calls with counts, elapsed and CPU times. The records can be used for application charge-back as well as generalized application performance reporting. IBM IMS Performance Analyzer and IMS Problem Investigator have pre-built report sets for these records. For more information, see IMS Performance Analyzer for z/OS: OMEGAMON ATF reporting and IMS Problem Investigator for z/OS: Analyzing OMEGAMON ATF records.