Using CICS PA to analyze CICS performance

CICS® PA provides reports and extracts to help you analyze and tune the performance of your CICS systems and applications.

  • The Performance List, List Extended, and Summary reports provide a detailed analysis of transaction activity.
  • The Performance Totals report provides comprehensive resource usage analysis of your entire CICS system, or individual transactions.
  • The Wait Analysis report summarizes transaction activity by wait time. For each transaction ID, the resources that cause this transaction to be suspended are shown in the order of most to least expensive. This report highlights the system resource bottlenecks that might be causing bad response time. More detailed analysis can then be performed, focusing on the problem resources identified.
  • The Transaction Profiling report compares two sets of CMF performance class data. For example, you can compare the performance data for a specific CICS application in two different time periods, or the performance data for all applications on two systems.
  • The Cross-System Work report combines CMF records from your connected systems (such as MRO and APPC) to produce a consolidated unit-of-work report.
  • The Cross-System Work extract consolidates CMF records for the same unit-of-work into a single record in CMF format. CICS PA can then process the extracted data set to produce any of the reports. For example, Summarize all multi-system UOWs whose originating transaction ID is TR01.
  • The Transaction Group report provides a detailed list of incoming work requests. Transactions that CICS executes under the same incoming work request (for example, the CWXN and CWBA transactions for CICS web support requests) are grouped together in the report.
  • The BTS report provides a detailed list of CICS Business Transaction Services activity. Transactions with the same CICS BTS process identifier (root activity identifier) are grouped together in the report.
  • The Workload Activity report provides a transaction response time analysis by z/OS® Workload Manager (WLM) service and report class. You can use this information to understand, from a CICS perspective, how well your CICS transactions are meeting their response time goals. The Workload Activity List report is a cross-system report that correlates CMF performance class data from single or multiple CICS systems for each network unit-of-work. Importantly, this report ties MRO and function shipping tasks to their originating task so that their impact on response time can be assessed.
  • The Transaction Tracking List report provides performance data for groups of related transactions. This allows monitoring and measurement of transaction performance from the perspective of transaction flow. The report shows how a process flowed from one transaction or system to the next and back again. The report combines CMF records for each originating transaction and its subordinate (group) transactions.
  • The Transaction Tracking Summary report combines CMF records for each originating transaction and its subordinate (group) transactions. The summarized data is presented on a single line for each grouped originating transaction.
  • The Exception List and Summary reports provide a detailed analysis of the exception events recorded by CMF.
  • The Transaction Resource Usage reports process CMF performance data and CMF resource class data to provide a detailed analysis of file, temporary storage, and distributed program link (DPL) usage.
  • Statistics Alerts enable you to define conditions, in terms of CICS Transaction Server or CICS Transaction Gateway statistics field values, that interest you. You can then use those conditions to report on CICS statistics stored in SMF files or historical databases.
  • The CICS Transaction Gateway reports provide reporting of CICS Transaction Gateway Statistics SMF 111 records. The following reports are available:
    • Activity
    • Usage and Capacity
    • Configuration
    • Client Workload
    • CICS Workload
  • The DB2 report processes CICS CMF records and DB2® accounting records to produce a consolidated and detailed view of DB2 usage by your CICS systems. With this report you can view CICS and DB2 resource usage statistics together in a single report. The DB2 List report shows detailed information of DB2 activity for each transaction. The DB2 Summary reports summarize DB2 activity by transaction and program within APPLID.
  • The WebSphere MQ report processes WebSphere® MQ accounting (SMF 116) records to produce a detailed view of WebSphere MQ usage by your CICS systems. The WebSphere MQ List report provides a trace of WebSphere MQ accounting records. The WebSphere MQ Summary report provides two summarized views of your WebSphere MQ transactions: by CICS transaction ID showing the WebSphere MQ system and queue resources used, and by WebSphere MQ queue name showing the transactions they service and resources used.
  • The OMEGAMON report processes OMEGAMON® XE for CICS (SMF 112) records to produce a detailed view of how CICS transactions use Adabas, CA-Datacom, CA-IDMS, and Supra. For each type of DBMS, you can request the following reports:
    • A List report for database usage for each transaction
    • A Transaction Summary report for database usage summarized by transaction ID
    • A Database Summary report for database usage summarized by database
  • The System Logger report processes System Logger records to provide information on the System Logger log streams and coupling facility structures that are used by CICS Transaction Server for logging, recovery and backout operations. The report can assist with measuring the effects of tuning changes and identifying log stream or structure performance problems.
  • The Performance Graph reports provide a graphical representation of transaction rates and response times.
  • The Extract data sets are produced from SMF data and are suitable for further manipulation and analysis. You can use the following extracts to import data into external programs such as DB2, or PC tools such as Lotus® 1-2-3:
    • A Performance Data Extract for CMF performance class data
    • A System Logger Extract for System Logger data
    • A Statistics Extract for CICS statistics

    The Cross-System Work extract is described earlier in this topic. You can use the Record Selection Extract to reduce the volume of data processed by CICS PA, for more efficient reporting. You can use HDB Load to load SMF data into a Historical Database (HDB).

You can use Report Forms to tailor the format of reports and extracts, for example, to specify which fields, the order of columns, and the sort sequence.

You can use Selection Criteria to filter your reporting, for example to include data for only a specific transaction ID, and only for a specific period of time.

For more information about CICS Performance Analyzer for z/OS, see CICS Performance Analyzer for z/OS V5.2.