CICS-supplied accounting and monitoring information

CICS® includes several facilities that provide accounting and monitoring. You can use these facilities to measure the use of different resources in a CICS system.

The most frequently used tools are as follows:
  • Statistics data.

    CICS statistics are the simplest tool for monitoring a CICS system. They contain information about the CICS system as a whole, such as its performance and use of resources. CICS statistics are suitable for performance tuning and capacity planning. CICS collects statistics during online processing, and processes them offline later. The statistics domain collects this data and then writes records to the System Management Facility (SMF) data set provided by MVS™. The records are of SMF type 110. You can process these records offline using the DFHSTUP program.

  • Monitoring data.
    CICS monitoring collects data about all user and CICS-supplied transactions during online processing for later offline analysis. The records produced by CICS monitoring are also of SMF type 110 and are written to the SMF data sets. Data provided by CICS monitoring is useful for performance tuning and for charging your users for the resources they use. Monitoring provides the following classes of data:
    • Performance class for detailed transaction level information
    • Transaction resource data for additional transaction-level information about individual resources accessed by a transaction
    • Exception class for exception conditions

CICS is a multitasking address space, and CICS monitoring facilities are generally used to determine the processor time and other resources that are consumed by the individual transactions, or functions performed by CICS.

For a full description of the CICS monitoring facilities, and details on activating, collecting, and processing this information, see CICS monitoring facility: Performance and tuning.

For both statistics data and monitoring data, you can use an offline processing facility. CICS Performance Analyzer and Tivoli® Decision Support for z/OS® are two tools that collect and analyze data from CICS and other IBM® systems and products. They can build reports that help you with:
  • Systems overview
  • Service levels
  • Availability
  • Performance and tuning
  • Capacity planning
For more information, see CICS Performance Analyzer for z/OS (CICS PA) and Tivoli Decision Support for z/OS.