CICS as an exploiter of IBM z/OS Workload Interaction Correlator

IBM® z/OS® Workload Interaction Correlator (Correlator) is a priced feature that provides infrastructure for z/OS software to generate synchronized, standardized, concise, content-rich data with common context for automated analysis by an analytics engine such as the IBM z/OS Workload Interaction Navigator. You can use Correlator to generate standardized SMF records for CICS, making it easier to identify and correlate workload across your mainframe environment.

Note:
  • IBM z/OS Workload Interaction Correlator requires IBM z14 or z15 hardware and is provided in PTFs for APAR OA57165 for z/OS in V2R3 and V2R4.
  • CICS support for IBM z/OS Workload Interaction Correlator requires CICS TS V5.5 with APAR PH16392 applied.
  • IBM z/OS Workload Interaction Correlator may be referred to as WIC in this documentation.

For details about IBM z/OS Workload Interaction Correlator, see IBM z/OS Workload Interaction Correlator documentation.

Overview

CICS exploits the services provided by WIC. When a CICS region starts, it uses the WIC IFAWIC service to register the region and request an instrumentation buffer, and provides the CICS WIC exit routine DFHWICEX that SMF calls during WIC processing.

The CICS WIC exit aggregates and summarizes transaction activities from all registered CICS regions and records exceptional CICS regions into SMF type 98 subtype 1024 records. If enabled, these records are generated every 5 seconds. The SMF record data is generated synchronously with a standard, concise and content-rich common context so that it can be used to establish a baseline, detect transient anomalies, and identify a significant contributing instance.

For details on how CICS exploits IBM z/OS Workload Interaction Correlator, see How it works: CICS and IBM z/OS Workload Interaction Correlator.

Interpreting and writing SMF type 98 subtype 1024 records

CICS provides DFHWICCD (an Assembler copybook) for you to interpret SMF type 98 subtype 1024 records. The same version is provided in /usr/lpp/cicsts/cicsts55/awi/dfhwiccd.awi for tools such as IBM z/OS Workload Interaction Navigator that need to read from files. The /usr/lpp/cicsts/cicsts55 directory is the installation directory for CICS files on z/OS® UNIX. This directory is specified by the USSDIR parameter in the DFHISTAR installation job.

Note: To analyze multiple SMF files collected from multiple systems respectively and to display the correlated anomalies across multiple systems for a single interval in one screen, you must have APAR PH30291 applied on CICS® TS 5.5 and use IBM z/OS Workload Interaction Navigator with PTF UJ04388 applied.

You can configure hardware instrumentation services (HIS) to write workload interaction correlator records to a z/OS UNIX file. For details, see Configuring HIS to write workload interaction correlator records to a z/OS UNIX file.