Preparing CICS TG Transaction Tracking

CICS TG Transaction Tracking monitors transactions as they flow through CICS Transaction Gateway (CICS TG) components and generates tracking data about those transactions.

CICS TG Transaction Tracking consists of a data collector which runs within the process or address space of the CICS TG component and captures transaction flow information about Gateway daemons and client applications. The flow information is then forwarded to the Transaction Collector for integration with events generated by data collectors from other domains, for example CICS. This data collector is available on both z/OS and distributed platforms. A data collector must be installed on every system that runs the CICS TG components that you want to track.

CICS TG Transaction Tracking is available in ITCAM for Transactions V7.1.0.1 and later. Support for IPIC-based transactions is available in ITCAM for Transactions V7.3.0.1 and later.

Flows are not correlated between the Gateway daemon (remote mode) or client applications (local mode) and CICS for all transaction types if the protocol used to connect to the target CICS server is ECI over TCP/IP or SNA, or if the transaction type is Extended Mode ECI and the protocol used is EXCI. Flows are not correlated between the Gateway daemon and CICS if a user replaceable module (DFHXCURM) is used that routes EXCI requests to a CICS region other than the region to which the original request would have flowed.

Where flows cannot be correlated, either because the interaction between the domains is not supported (for example, a flow between CICS TG and CICS over SNA protocol) or one part of the interaction has not been instrumented (for example, the CICS TG Transaction Tracking data collector is enabled but the CICS data collector is disabled), details of the connection can be displayed using pseudo nodes. A pseudo node represents the untracked part of the transaction and appears on a topology view as a standard icon connected to other nodes with a dashed line instead of a solid line.

For CICS TG Transaction Tracking, pseudo nodes can be used to identify flows to or from clients that cannot be instrumented (for example non-Java ECI V2 clients) and flows between CICS TG components and TXSeries server instances.

Pseudo interactions are enabled by default. If you do not want to display pseudo interactions, you can disable them. See Transaction Reporter agent configuration parameters for further information.

In the workspaces within the Tivoli Enterprise Portal, events generated by client applications, for example a J2C connection factory within WebSphere Application Server or a stand-alone application, appear as component type CTG Client. Events generated by a Gateway daemon appear as component type CTG Gateway. In a remote mode configuration, you will see a CTG Client instance link with a CTG Gateway instance, which in turn stitches to a CICS instance. In a local mode configuration, you will see a CTG Client instance stitch directly with the CICS instance and there will be no CTG Gateway instance.

If you are monitoring a J2C connection factory on a WebSphere Application Server with ITCAM for Application Diagnostics configured, the events generated by the CICS TG Transaction Tracking data collector can stitch with ITCAM for Application Diagnostics events. If configured, you will see the events generated by ITCAM for Application Diagnostics stitched to a CTG Client instance.

The CICS TG Transaction Tracking data collector writes log messages to the standard error log stream of the CICS TG component it is tracking. You can also configure the data collector to write log messages to a file.

The remainder of this section deals with the installation and configuration of CICS TG Transaction Tracking on distributed systems. On z/OS, CICS TG Transaction Tracking is installed as part of the Transactions Base FMID. See CICS TG Transaction Tracking in the Installation and Configuration Guide for z/OS for further information.