What is CICS Performance Analyzer for z/OS?

CICS® Performance Analyzer for z/OS® (CICS PA) is a comprehensive performance reporting tool to help you develop, analyze, tune, and manage your CICS Transaction Server systems.

CICS PA provides an ISPF menu-driven dialog to request generation of reports and extracts from System Monitoring Facility (SMF) files.

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Figure 1. CICS Performance Analyzer overview
This figure shows the components of CICS PA, the inputs, the outputs, and how they relate to each other.
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The dialog has many features to help you to specify your input files, filter the data, and tailor the reports and extracts to meet many different reporting requirements.

CICS PA helps you analyze the performance of your CICS systems using the following SMF record types:
  • CICS Monitoring Facility (CMF) performance class, exception class, and transaction resource class (SMF 110, subtype 1)
  • CICS Transaction Server (CICS TS) statistics (SMF 110, subtype 2) and CICS Server statistics (SMF 110, subtypes 3, 4, and 5)
  • IBM® z/OS System Logger for CICS journaling (SMF 88)
  • IBM CICS Transaction Gateway (CICS TG) statistics (SMF 111)
  • IBM DB2® accounting (SMF 101)
  • IBM WebSphere® MQ accounting (SMF 116)
  • IBM OMEGAMON® XE for CICS (SMF 112) containing transaction data for Adabas, CA-Datacom, CA-IDMS, and Supra database management systems

These data sources provide input for generating reports, storing in HDBs, or exporting for analysis using IBM CICS Explorer®, spreadsheets or SQL.

The Historical Database (HDB) facility provides data warehousing of SMF data. It helps you to manage CICS transaction performance and CICS statistics data for long term analysis. HDBs are designed and managed from the dialog. You can submit batch jobs to report against data in a List or Summary HDB, and export data to DB2 tables or CSV files for further analysis.

CICS PA can be useful to anyone who needs to monitor and manage CICS system and CICS application performance:
  • CICS System Programmers:
    • System performance monitoring and tuning
    • Improve CICS system resource usage
    • Improve transaction response times
  • CICS Application Programmers:
    • Analyze CICS application performance
    • Transaction performance monitoring
    • DB2 and VSAM database performance monitoring
  • Information Technology Managers:
    • Capacity planning
    • Service Level Agreements
    • Ongoing system management and measurement reports