What is CICS PA?

CICS® Performance Analyzer for z/OS® (CICS PA) is a reporting tool that provides information on the performance of your CICS systems and applications, and helps you tune, manage, and plan your CICS systems effectively. CICS PA also provides a historical database facility to help you manage CICS statistics and performance data for your CICS transactions.

CICS PA is not an online monitoring tool. It produces reports and extracts using data normally collected by your system in MVS™ System Management Facilities (SMF) data sets and log streams:
  • CICS Monitoring Facility (CMF) performance class, exception class, and transaction resource class data in SMF 110 records
  • CICS statistics and server statistics data in SMF 110 records
  • CICS Transaction Gateway statistics data in SMF 111 records
  • DB2® accounting data in SMF 101 records
  • WebSphere® MQ accounting data in SMF 116 records
  • System Logger data in SMF 88 records
  • IBM® Tivoli® OMEGAMON® XE for CICS on z/OS (OMEGAMON XE for CICS) data in SMF 112 records, containing transaction data for Adabas, CA-Datacom, CA-IDMS, and Supra database management systems

It is designed to complement the CICS-supplied utilities and sample programs such as DFH$MOLS, DFHSTUP, and DFH0STAT.

CICS PA can help:
  • System Programmers to track overall CICS system performance and evaluate the results of their system tuning efforts
  • Application Programmers to analyze the performance of their applications and the resources they use
  • Database Administrators to analyze the usage and performance of database systems such as IMS™ and DB2
  • MQ Administrators to analyze the usage and performance of their WebSphere MQ messaging systems
  • Managers to ensure transactions are meeting their required Service Levels and measure trends to help plan future requirements and strategies
CICS PA reports all aspects of CICS system activity and resource usage, including:
  • Transaction response time
  • CICS system resource usage
  • Cross-system performance, including multi-region operation (MRO) and advanced program-to-program communication (APPC)
  • CICS Business Transaction Services (BTS)
  • CICS Web support
  • External subsystems, including DB2, IMS, and WebSphere MQ
  • CICS transaction usage of database management systems that are monitored by OMEGAMON XE for CICS: Adabas, CA-Datacom, CA-IDMS, and Supra
  • System Logger performance
  • Exception events that cause performance degradation
  • Transaction file and temporary storage usage