Policy actions

The supported policy actions are to issue a message, emit an event to an event processing (EP) adapter or to all EP adapters in a EP adapter set, abend the task, reject an EXEC CICS request, or set z/OS® WLM health open status.

The following actions can be triggered when the conditions for a task or system rule are met:

Actions System rules Task rules
Issue a message (default) Issue one of the following messages:
  • DFHMP3009 if the system rule is installed into a stand-alone CICS® region.
  • DFHMP3010 if the system rule is installed on a CICS platform.
 Issue one of the following messages:
  • DFHMP3001 for a non-application user task.
  • DFHMP3007 for a CICS application user task.
Abend the task Not applicable. Issue either the default abend code AMPB or a user-specified abend code.
CICS also issues one of the following messages:
  • DFHMP3002 for a non-application task.
  • DFHMP3008 for a CICS application user task.

By default, a transaction dump is taken for the abend. You can suppress the transaction dump, or request a system dump, by using the CEMT SET TRDUMPCODE|SYDUMPCODE or EXEC CICS SET TRANDUMPCODE|SYDUMPCODE commands.

You can handle the abend by using the EXEC CICS HANDLE ABEND command.
Emit an event Emit an event to either a single event processing (EP) adapter or all adapters in an EP Adapter set. Emit an event to either a single event processing (EP) adapter or all adapters in an EP Adapter set.
Reject EXEC CICS request Reject the EXEC CICS request with an INVREQ response and an EIBRESP2 value of 400. Not applicable.
Set z/OS WLM health open status Set the z/OS WLM health open status of the CICS region, which will result in increasing or decreasing the region's WLM health value.
CICS also issues one of the following messages:
  • DFHMP3015 if the system rule is installed into a stand-alone CICS region.
  • DFHMP3016 if the system rule is installed on a CICS platform.
Important: If you use system rules, you must give careful consideration to your implementation of system rules.
  • Complication arises when you have mixed system rules, some with an action of SET WLMHEALTH OPEN while others with an action of SET WLMHEALTH CLOSE or SET WLMHEALTH IMMCLOSE. In most cases, you want to set a region's z/OS WLM health status to OPEN only when all of the specified conditions are met and to set it to CLOSE or IMMCLOSE when any of these conditions is not met. In this situation, as best practice you can define multiple system rules for these conditions with an action of SET WLMHEALTH CLOSE or SET WLMHEALTH IMMCLOSE, but should manually initiate a SET WLMHEALTH OPEN request when appropriate. This is because a region's z/OS WLM health status will be set OPEN as soon as the first system rule with an action of SET WLMHEALTH OPEN is triggered, which might result in premature increasing of the health value when multiple system rules specify an action of SET WLMHEALTH OPEN.
 Not applicable.
Notes:
  • Policy events can be emitted only to asynchronous and non-transactional EP adapters.
  • The information that is captured in policy events is predetermined and cannot be customized.
  • During the processing of a task abend, CICS stops checking the task against policy rules; while policy counters are updated, no policy actions (messages, events, or abends) occur.
  • As CICS policies are not enabled until the late stages of CICS initialization, any programs run during PLT processing will not trigger any task or system policy rules. For example, if an MQ connection is established during CICS initialization, this occurs at the start of the 2nd stage of PLT processing before any policy rules are enabled, so no IBM® MQ connection status system rules will be triggered for any state changes.

For information about the supported EP adapters, see Event processing adapters.

For information about the data that is captured for policy events, see Data captured for a policy event.