Assessing and Analyzing CICS Storage Health

Automated assessments of key CICS Statistics Storage metrics facilitate proactive analysis and prevention of outages by identifying areas that may warrant investigation. These views also expedite learning by highlighting metrics that are important to understand and analyze.

More CICS Statistics Videos

1. Assessing CICS Storage Health
2. Assessing CICS Transaction & Enqueue Health
3. CICS Transaction Class Metrics
4. CICS TCB Dispatcher Metrics – Part 1
5. CICS TCB Dispatcher Metrics – Part 2 (T8 TCBs)

Video Transcript

Right. So, the IntelliMagic Vision implementation of CICS Health Assessments assesses more than 70 metrics for each region using thresholds, initially set on industry best practices, which can then be customized and then views start with high level groupings and then provide drill downs from there. And they’re designed to direct your attention to potential issues that may warrant investigation, ideally that they can be dealt with before they impact production. And here’s some examples of metrics from CICS statistics records that lend themselves to being assessed as part of the overall health of a region. All right. So let’s look at some examples of the potential value that can come from these types of health assessments.

So here Application Type grouping is being used at the top level to make assessments from probably hundreds or even thousands of regions to be consumable. So in the area of Storage Health Time, short on storage is one metric that can certainly be of interest. So we come down here to this group and there are regions and there are multiple exceptions here.

So, let’s go ahead and look into those, seeing the entire set of metrics over time in a single view can be helpful to identify potential relationships. So, at the same time, we’re getting lots of times short on storage. There’s several GETMAIN exception conditions happening as well.

All right. So here’s the overall number of times short on storage and then drilling down by storage area shows that these exceptions are occurring in three different extended areas, Extended User DSA, Read Only DSA, and Shared DSA. All right. So as we explore the CICS Statistics data today, I’m going to collect some key charts into a dashboard. That way, once we identify and customize the views that we want to see, we can go back and view them later for this or other data intervals. We’ll also use it to recap at the end.

All right. So let’s go ahead then and drill into the Extended User DSA short on storage conditions and look at it by the regions that it’s occurring in. And as we do that, we’re going to see in a second that those occurrences are spread across many regions. So then, there we go, spread across many regions. So one of the next questions we’re probably going to want to ask is, is that a common occurrence or is it an anomaly? So one way to do that is with some kind of a time of day profile that looks over a broad range and indicates what the occurrences are. So here’s such a display and I’m going to broaden out now to also include the day that we were looking at here. Okay. So this view combines the green line is an average, the green bars are a 10th and 90th percentile. So, you know, for a month and a half like this, you threw out the four or five highest and lowest days. So you can kind of see the range and then the yellow bars are the absolute minimum in maximum value. So we can see that this 50 value that we saw is indeed the highest absolute value that occurred over the interval.