Trace facilities

CICS® trace facilities are intended primarily as debugging tools. However, because they record all requests for CICS, you can use them to analyze the performance of individual transactions.

For information about trace entries produced in a DBCTL environment see Troubleshooting DBCTL. For information about specifying CICS trace parameters, see Using CICS trace.

CICS auxiliary trace facility

You can use the CICS auxiliary trace facility to record trace entries on a separate data set to be analyzed later. Trace entries are time-stamped and they can provide detailed information for analyzing constraints or other problems that can occur while CICS is running. For examples of CICS auxiliary trace output, see Trace entries produced by CICS.

However, consider carefully how often you use CICS auxiliary trace because it generates a large volume of entries, which means that there might be a considerable overhead if you run it all the time. Also, you might find it difficult to use too large a volume of such data effectively.