Overview of IBM Z OMEGAMON for CICS

IBM Z OMEGAMON for CICS is a member of the latest generation of the OMEGAMON® family of mainframe monitoring products.

OMEGAMON infrastructure management solutions help you achieve a true on-demand computing environment. These products can help you meet the demands of increasing data center volume, complexity, and volatility by giving your information technology team the tools to quickly identify, isolate, and fix any issues before they impact your customers.

IBM Z OMEGAMON for CICS helps you proactively manage performance and availability of CICS® Transaction Server and CICS Transaction Gateway (CICS TG) systems from an integrated interface in order to understand how resources are used and how system performance affects users.

IBM Z OMEGAMON for CICS helps you clearly see and understand application and system events. You can monitor and manage CICS transactions and CICS TG transaction level activities, at the big picture and granular levels and interact with other applications, within a single interface. OMEGAMON for CICS on z/OS is designed to enable you to detect problems quickly and take action in real time to speed up your problem resolution.

The data collected by the monitoring agents and the alerts that are triggered by monitored conditions are displayed in a graphical, Java-based interface, shared with other OMEGAMON and IBM Tivoli Monitoring products. The enhanced 3270UI enables summarization of data at the CICSplex reporting level and also provides access to CICS TG information.

When used in conjunction with other OMEGAMON monitoring products, the data, analyses, and alerts presented by IBM Z OMEGAMON for CICS help you develop a holistic view of your entire computing enterprise from a single console.

IBM Z OMEGAMON for CICS contains these four configured z/OS® system components:
  • Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server
  • OMEGAMON enhanced 3270 user interface
  • IBM Z OMEGAMON for CICS monitoring agent
  • IBM Z OMEGAMON for CICS TG on z/OS monitoring agent

IBM Z OMEGAMON for CICS

IBM Z OMEGAMON for CICS helps you anticipate performance problems and warns you when critical events take place on your site's CICS environments by offering a central point of management for CICS Transaction Server instances and CICSplex groups.

When running under the Tivoli Enterprise Portal, IBM Z OMEGAMON for CICS offers a central point of management for CICS Transaction Server and provides a comprehensive means for gathering the information you need to detect and prevent problems within your CICS region or CICSplex.

This data enables you to perform the following tasks:

  • Collect and analyze reliable, up-to-the-second data that allows you to make faster, better informed, operating decisions
  • Manage all CICS regions from a single point to identify problems at any time
  • Monitor the workloads across various regions
  • Track performance against goals
  • Exploit user-defined and predefined situations based on thresholds to raise different types of alerts

IBM Z OMEGAMON for CICS provides data on both individual CICS regions and logical grouping of CICS regions in a CICSplex. You can classify CICS regions into a CICSplex instances using simple rules or you can reuse definitions you might already have if you use CICSPlex® System Manager.

You can view the data provided by IBM Z OMEGAMON for CICS through various user interfaces:

IBM Z OMEGAMON for CICS TG

IBM OMEGAMON for CICS TG on z/OS (OMEGAMON for CICS TG on z/OS) V5.6.0 is an optionally configured component in the runtime environment of the IBM® Tivoli® OMEGAMON for CICS on z/OS base product. You can configure OMEGAMON for CICS TG on z/OS in a runtime environment without having to configure OMEGAMON for CICS or OMEGAMON for CICS on z/OS.

OMEGAMON for CICS TG on z/OS offers a central point of management for CICS TG and CICS TG resource adapters deployed within the IBM WebSphere Application Server on the z/OS operating system. It comprehensively gathers the information necessary to detect, correct, and prevent problems within your CICS TG applications. Using the Tivoli Enterprise Portal, you can view the data gathered from the monitoring agent in tables and charts. These tables and charts indicate the status of your managed CICS TG address spaces (that is, instances of the CICS TG daemon), CICS TG connection factories in WebSphere Application Server, and connectivity to CICS Transaction Server.

Apart from the capabiltites that are provided by IBM Z OMEGAMON for CICS, you can use this information to perform the following tasks:

  • Manage all CICS TG applications from a single point to identify problems at any time
  • Collect CICS TG statistics, which you can use to view thread activity, report CICS TS communication failures, examine resource waits and EXCI (External CICS Interface) pipe usage, and check for excessive transaction rollbacks, among other monitoring activities
  • Manage CICS TG active transactions and provide response time analysis
  • Monitor CICS TG resource adapters deployed within the WebSphere Application Server.

With OMEGAMON for CICS TG on z/OS, systems administrators can set threshold levels and flags to alert them when system conditions reach these thresholds. They can use advanced monitoring facilities that include the following uses:

  • User-defined and predefined situations based on thresholds to raise different types of alerts
  • At-a-glance status of all CICS TG regions
  • The capability to monitor multiple CICS TG regions simultaneously from one or more centralized workstations