Guided Tour: Performance HDB

A CICS PA Historical Database (HDB) is a repository of statistics and performance-related data for your CICS® systems.

HDBs use SMF records to build a history of statistics and performance-related data that can be customized to meet your various reporting requirements. Your HDB environment is controlled from the CICS PA ISPF dialog. It provides a fully managed environment from where you can control all aspects of CICS statistics and performance data, including collection and reporting.

Implementing a statistics and performance data warehouse requires a considerable investment. Careful planning is required to ensure that the data you collect today is useful in the long term to measure CICS performance trends and workloads to help you plan for the future. Therefore it is important that you are familiar with the features and capabilities of HDBs before embarking on implementation.

This chapter introduces the HDB facility and describes key concepts. It then takes you on a Guided Tour to show you how to use the CICS PA dialog to define and maintain your Performance HDBs, produce reports, and export the HDB data to DB2® tables.