CICS® considerations

Before you run the installation jobs that enable your CICS® regions to collect CICS® IA data, you must consider and resolve the following questions.

  • In which CICS® regions do I want to collect CICS® IA data?
  • In which types of CICS® regions should I collect CICS® IA data?
  • In which one CICS® region can I administer and operate CICS® IA?
  • Do I want to collect Db2® command in this CICS® region?
  • Do I want to use the Command Flow collector?
The CICS® IA collector can be enabled in your development, test, QA, and production environments. The CICS® IA collector can be enabled in different types of CICS® regions that include the following:
  • Application owning regions (AORs).
  • Data Owning regions (DORs, FORs, TSQueue owning regions).
  • Terminal Owning regions.
CICS® IA provides three types of collectors:
  • The dependency collector
  • The affinity collector
  • The command flow collector

The Dependency Collector captures data on the commands and resources that are used by a Transaction and Program in the CICS® region. Application programs are typically run in AORs, so it makes sense to enable CICS® IA in your AORs at the start.

If you want to answer questions such as:
  • Which CICS® regions use the FILE resource PAYFILE?
  • Which Db2® tables are used by my CICS® regions?
  • Which TSQUEUEs are used by my CICS® regions?
You can enable CICS® IA in your Data Owning regions.

The affinity collector captures information that you can use to proceed with deploying CPSM Workload Management. The affinity collector helps identifying transactions that must remain in the same CICS® regions as it started because it has an affinity to that region. If you are planning to clone an application region and use CPSM WLM to manage the work across these regions, you must enable CICS® IA in this region.

The command flow collector captures information about all the commands that are issued by your CICS® tasks, in chronological order. The command flow collector can capture information from the start of a transaction in a TOR, the commands that are issued by your application in the AOR. When you activate the command flow collector you can choose which regions to start the collector in, you must enable CICS® IA in all of those regions.

If you are using cloned regions, you might want to consider enabling CICS® IA in one or two of these regions, but not all your cloned regions. The data that you collect ought to be the same. You might think that these regions are exact clones, however, by collecting CICS® IA data in two different clones you can view and compare which resources and commands are being used.