The CICS monitoring facility (CMF)

The CICS® monitoring facility (CMF) collects data about all transactions in the CICS region during online processing for later offline analysis. The monitoring records are written to the SMF data set.

The CICS monitoring facility collects four types of data:
  • Exception class data is information about CICS resource shortages that a transaction encounters, such as queuing for file strings or waiting for temporary storage. This data highlights possible problems in CICS system operation, and is intended to help you identify system constraints that affect the performance of your transactions. CICS writes one exception record for each exception condition that occurs.
  • Identity class data provides enhanced audit information by capturing identity propagation data (an X.500 distinguished name and associated realm) from a client system across a network for eligible transactions.
  • Performance class data is detailed transaction-level information, such as the processor and elapsed time for a transaction or the time spent waiting for I/O. CICS writes at least one performance monitoring record for each transaction that is being monitored.
  • Transaction resource class data provides additional transaction-level information about individual resources that are accessed by a transaction. The transaction resource class covers distributed program link, file, and temporary storage queue resources. CICS writes one transaction resource record for each transaction that is being monitored, if the transaction accesses at least one of the resources for which monitoring data is requested.
You can also code additional event monitoring points in your application programs, which are known as user EMPs.
You can switch CICS monitoring on or off, select the classes of monitoring data that you want to be collected, and set or change other monitoring settings, in these ways:
  • CICS system initialization parameters at startup.
  • The CICS monitoring facility transaction CEMN, while CICS is running.
  • The main terminal CEMT INQUIRE MONITOR and CEMT SET MONITOR commands while CICS is running.
  • The EXEC CICS INQUIRE MONITOR and SET MONITOR commands, while CICS is running.

The CICS monitoring facility can produce a significant volume of output. CICS can perform data compression on the output by using the z/OS® Data Compression and Expansion Services and the default is for monitoring records to be compressed. You can switch data compression on and off while CICS is running. You can also exclude some monitoring data fields from collection by using the CICS monitoring control table (MCT), which you set up before running CICS. If you use the MCT, you might exclude fields that might, in fact, provide important information. If you use the data compression default, you might find that you do not have to exclude monitoring fields.

You can process the output from the CICS monitoring facility by using products such as CICS Performance Analyzer and IBM Z® Decision Support, or your own application program, or the CICS supplied sample program DFH$MOLS. If you use data compression, the records must be expanded again before they can be analyzed. Check that your chosen product can work with these records. If it does not, you can use DFH$MOLS with the EXPAND control statement to produce an output data set containing the SMF monitoring records in their expanded format, for the tool to work with.

See Monitoring for more information.