CICS and event processing

You can specify, capture, and emit business events from CICS®. These business events can be consumed by another CICS application, or placed on a WebSphere® MQ queue for consumption in a variety of ways, including for example, consumption by a complex event processing engine such as IBM® Operational Decision Manager.

Figure 1. Event processing high level architecture
This diagram shows the CICS event binding editor being used to define application event capture points, system event capture points and event processing adapters. The captured events are then passed to the event dispatcher for formatting and emission to various EP adapters. These events can then be consumed by IBM Operational Decision Manager, IBM Business Monitor, or other event consumers.
CICS Transaction Server for z/OS® provides the following comprehensive support for simple business events:
  • A CICS application can capture and emit events with no change to the application itself, using noninvasive capture points, before and after selected EXEC CICS API calls, and at program start.
  • A CICS system can capture and emit events relating to system activity. For example, resource status changes, or crossing task thresholds.
  • For situations in which the noninvasive capture points are not sufficient to capture a specific business event, a new EXEC CICS API call, SIGNAL EVENT, allows events to be captured anywhere in a CICS application.
  • After CICS has captured an event, CICS provides a variety of EP adapters for formatting and routing events, or you can also write your own custom EP adapter.
  • CICS event processing supports interoperability standards with business event consumers such as IBM Business Monitor by emitting events in the Common Base Event specification V1.01 format. The Common Base Event format is an event format used across many products.

    Start of changeCICS provides support for the IBM Operational Decision Manager XML formats for events, for interoperability with components of IBM Operational Decision Manager. For details, see Developing event projects in Operational Decision Manager product documentation.End of change

The CICS Explorer® includes the CICS event binding editor, a tool that helps you to define your business events.