IntelliMagic Vision Adds CICS Statistics Automated Analysis

IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS release 10.9.0 includes major enhancements to reporting on CICS SMF data letting you monitor the performance and resource usage of your mission critical applications and transactions.

CICS is the leading z/OS application server used by the majority of the Fortune 500 companies in the banking, transport, retail, and insurance industries. CICS produces extensive SMF metrics that offer rich potential insights for its management and operation. This allows for monitoring of Service Level Agreements (SLA’s), application use, and capacity planning. Since CICS is mostly used for running mission critical applications, this monitoring is essential to ensure the required high availability of the CICS regions.

With the addition of CICS Statistics support, IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS now makes it much easier to review and assess the voluminous CICS Statistics data in addition to the previously supported CICS Transaction data.

Automated Analysis and Monitoring for CICS Statistics for z/OS

CICS Statistics produces metrics on shared resources within regions that are essential to managing CICS availability and performance. Unfortunately, most of the currently available reporting solutions are expensive and cumbersome to use. They also do not include automated analysis of the data to augment the human team knowing what to focus on and why, and to solve problems more quickly. When relying on manual or static approaches to the data, it is difficult to know where to go next when drilling down into issues, symptoms etc. Also, because of the vast amount of data, the availability of CICS reports on the historical SMF data is often 12 hours or longer for many sites.

IntelliMagic Vision’s new functionality includes support for 19 fields in the Statistics data, and more than 70 automated Health Insights for the CICS 110 SMF data. The new data types are intelligently correlated to related metrics and fully support the advanced user interface capabilities such as click-to-query, click-to-compare, and click-to-customize for superior interaction with the data. IntelliMagic Vision also enables z/OS performance teams to quickly derive actionable value out of the data and provides context sensitive drill downs into the next appropriate report set guiding you to your problem solution.

Benefits of IntelliMagic Vision for z/OS CICS:

• Automated assessments of key metrics to proactively direct your attention to potential risks to CICS region availability and performance
• Navigating through the typically large numbers of regions and massive volumes of transaction data to quickly focus analysis on the desired subset of data
• Logical grouping of the approximately 100 timing buckets provided for CICS transactions to facilitate response time analysis
• An introduction into the many other types of metrics available at the transaction level from the more than 270 non-timing related fields in the SMF 110.1 records
• Visibility into levels of detail within CICS regions provided by the Statistics data including by storage area, TCB pool and mode, TCLASS, and file and enqueue names

One customer remarked: ”What you can do in IntelliMagic Vision in 4 clicks would take manually reviewing 4400 static reports in the old way.” Another user states: “Normally I had to run my batch SMF 110 reports, and then diving in I would find out I would need to tweak the code and rerun them to see exactly what I need. With IntelliMagic, I go to a spot, drill down, boom. It’s simple, you can get to the field you need very quickly.”

To learn more about this topic, you can visit www.intellimagic.com/cics or view the recording of IntelliMagic’s zAcademy webinar: Imagine How Much You Can Learn Exploring CICS Transaction and Statistics Data.