CICS Interdependency Analyzer v2.1 reveals runtime relationships to help you increase availability and better manage CICS applications
from CCR2, Issue 10 - 2005
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By Rob Matzak, CICS Tools Development Manager |
Spreading workloads across multiple CICS regions on a mainframe can improve availability by allowing you to take regions down for maintenance and work around unplanned outages. But splitting CICS workloads requires an understanding of CICS affinities and other resource dependencies within your CICS applications. Can you readily find this information in your company's documentation? Do you have access to CICS application source code?
In many IT organizations, such information may have been mislaid decades ago. Manually uncovering CICS application details you need can be as time-consuming as finding a needle in a corporate haystack. IBM CICS Interdependency Analyzer for z/OS v2.1 can find that needle for you — quickly and easily — in real time, which makes it an excellent tool for staff taking on a CICS application with insufficient documentation.
Reveal runtime relationships
CICS Interdependency Analyzer is a runtime discovery tool that automates detection of relationships in your CICS Transaction Server environment. The solution collects and stores data about CICS transactions and programs and the CICS, DB2, IMS and WebSphere MQ resources they use. The solution includes a graphical user interface (GUI) to help you analyze the database, build a relationship roadmap and use the data in your daily operations with simple point-and-click navigation.
What exactly do your CICS applications do as they execute? CICS Interdependency Analyzer can show you. The tool can be used to help you better understand application flow, avoid change-induced problems and provide information to appropriate subject matter experts for requesting application changes that could help you improve performance and availability.
For example, the insight provided by this solution can show application programmers which programs read and write to a file before they change a record length that could cause errors. And application developers, working together with system programmers, can ensure they don't create affinities and impair your ability to balance workloads later in production. In addition, the solution can help developers reuse code as part of your company's service oriented architecture (SOA) approach to improve business flexibility.
This version of CICS Interdependency Analyzer includes enhancements such as the following:
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An Eclipse-based graphical user interface and improved query management facilities that make it easy for you to access the collected data. Because the new interface is based on the XML application programming interface (API), automated processes can query the database as well. |
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A timer-based collector control to allow you to select regions and collection times. For example, you can set the tool to schedule collection in different regions throughout the data collection process. This enables you to work around high volume time periods or target collection for when an application is active. |
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A selective program and transaction Exclude list to eliminate extraneous data and reduce overhead during data capture. |
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The capability to turn data collection for multiple CICS regions on and off en masse with a single CINT command to speed selection. |
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Easier installation and tool customization. |
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Conclusion
CICS Interdependency Analyzer is a member of IBM's family of CICS tools for zSeries that support the IBM CICS Transaction Server environment. Information provided by CICS Interdependency Analyzer can help you improve the availability of your CICS applications, reduce cost and increase speed of CICS application maintenance, and help reuse existing CICS applications in service oriented architecture (SOA) implementations.
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