The IA V1.3 Story

CICS Interdependency Analyzer has been in the CICS toolkit for many years. IBM announced a new release of the product in September 2004. This new release provides significant enhancements to an already excellent tool.

CICS IA is a unique tool that aids a user in understanding the resource usage and placement in their CICS systems.

Information provided by CICS IA can assist the user to:

Use CICS resources more effectively and efficiently
Reduce problem resolution time
Improve CICS systems and application designs
Minimize the impact of routine application maintenance on the end user
Balance application workloads for higher availability
Increase the speed while reducing cost of application maintenance

A CICS System Programmer or IT Professional in a Capacity/Performance role might utilize this tool to:

Understand cross-system applications and dependencies.
Know the resource topology within a particular CICS region.
Run comparisons on discovered data (such as interdependencies by region).
Identify the resource flow following a transaction ABEND.
Recognize the effect of opening and closing files.

What’s In the New Release?

A batch job is provided to load data captured by the Transaction Affinities utility (part of CICS TS) into the tool’s Resource Relationship DB2 tables for analysis. This provides a single point of control for reporting on, managing and housekeeping of the collected data.

The powerhouse SQL query facility interface is enhanced to assist in analysis of data in the affinities data tables. A set of sample SQL queries is provided to allow resource comparisons on the data in the DB2 tables. These enable basic predictive capabilities, for example:

1. Comparison of applications across regions

2. Comparison of all interdependencies across regions

The Collector function now supports long resource names of up to 200 bytes. The Collector for the DB2 subsystem now identifies the resource name whenever possible.

Task Control Block (TCB) information is gathered by the Collector. This may be useful for identifying CICS-DB2 programs that are not threadsafe.

An IA tool user can now differentiate between types of Temporary Storage Queues (TSQs) - Main, auxiliary, and Coupling Facility.

A set of sample SQL queries and jobs is provided to allow housekeeping functions to be performed on the data in the tool’s DB2 tables. For example:

Delete all resources captured before a given date
Delete all resources for a given application

The Scanner has been enhanced to report on affinities and interdependencies, and provides an option to load Scanner data into a DB2 table.

Transaction Affinity Utility versus CICS IA

You can now load data captured by the Transaction Affinities utility (part of CICS TS) into CICS IA DB2 tables for analysis.

What are transaction affinities ?

1. Exist when persistent state data is created in a CICS AOR.

2. Subsequent instances MUST execute in the same AOR.

3. Duration of the affinity is the lifetime of the state data.

What is Transaction Affinities Utility in CICS TS?

Intended for those users planning to use CICS workload management. It can be used to create basic CPSM definitions. Some captured EXEC CICS commands overlap with CICS IA.

What Does IA Give Me Over TAU?

The table (Table 1) below provides a description of what IA provides to enhance the basic TAU captured data.

CICS Interdependency Analyzer V1.3 adds value for affinity analysis by providing a single point of access to interdependency and affinity data and a flexible and easy to use interface for managing affinity data. This can aid the user by answering questions like:

– show me all Inter Transaction Affinities by region

– show me all ENQ/DEQ type affinities by application

– show me all affinities for program ABCD

– show me Transaction System Affinities for transaction XXXX

– show me all affinity groups which have CPSM groups built.

Pre-Requisites

Software pre-requisites are:

– IBM OS/390, V2.10 or IBM z/OS at any level

– IBM CICS Transaction Server for OS/390, Version 1.3 or IBM CICS Transaction Server for z/OS, Version 2.2 or Version 2.3

– IBM DB2 Universal Database Server for OS/390, Version 6.1 or later

Summary

The latest release of CICS Interdependency Analyzer nicely folds transaction affinity data into an easily queried and easily built relational database.

CICS IA helps the technical professional to understand their CICS applications (some over 30 years old! With documentation lost or incomplete) in order to maintain and update these applications with the full knowledge of resource interdependencies involved.

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